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sced_21_7_oc.qxp 6/5/2012 7:44 PM Page 1

Introduction

John M. Lynch

Published online: 29 February 2012! Springer Science+Business Media B.V. 2012

In November 1859, Charles Darwin’s groundbreaking statement of his theory of descentwith modification though natural selection was published as On the Origin of Species byMeans of Natural Selection, or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life.Almost exactly 150 years later, a series of papers were presented at the annual meeting ofthe History of Science Society (Phoenix, AZ, USA) which sought to examine how the ideasof Darwin were disseminated by ‘‘Darwinians’’ and popularizers in the years following thatpublication, while also examining how the very notion of Darwinism was constructed byDarwin’s supporters.

The majority of the papers in this special issue of Science & Education originated in thatsession, which was titled ‘‘Popularizing and Policing ‘Darwinism’ 1859–1900.’’ Quotingthe session abstract:

Debates about the reception of Darwin’s Origin have been integral to our understanding of thedevelopment of modern evolutionary biology. This scholarship has revealed that there were manydiverse readings of what it meant to call oneself a ‘Darwinian,’ which were not only contested, butchanged over time. Darwin’s inner-circle of supporters held different levels of commitment toDarwin’s ideas quite comfortably, but there were others who, formerly in this circle, found them-selves either marginalized – as was the experience of the Harvard botanist, Asa Gray when he visitedEngland in 1868, or excluded, as in the case of the Catholic evolutionist, St. George Jackson Mivart.Popularizers of Darwin and his ideas – and there were many - only further muddied the waters withtheir various appropriations and presentations of Darwin and his ideas to the public. This session willexplore these negotiations over what it meant to be a Darwinian among those who proved some of themost influential in molding the public perception of ‘Darwinism.’ Although Darwin tried, he failed tocontrol these variously progressive, teleological, and theistic interpretations of his work. If sales areany indication, the Anglo-American public was gripped more by ‘non-Darwinian’ accounts by thelikes of Grant Allen, Samuel Butler, Arabella Buckley and Charles Kingsley, than by the more‘Darwinian’ accounts of George John Romanes and Thomas Henry Huxley.

The papers by Piers J. Hale (on Kingsley) and Russell T. Hunter (on Gray) are directlyderived from their presentations in Phoenix. Bernard Lightman—who originally spoke on

We dedicate this issue to our dear friend, colleague and mentor, Gar Allen, on the occasion of his 75thbirthday.

J. M. Lynch (&)Barrett, the Honors College, Arizona State University, Tempe, AZ 85287-1612, USAe-mail: john.lynch@asu.edu

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Anglo-American popularizers of evolution—decided to submit a paper on popularizationsof evolution for young people. The paper by Richard Bellon was invited especially for thisissue.

Why is this of interest to educators and scientists? Firstly, the very definition of Dar-winism remains somewhat problematic. Contemporary opponents of evolution reducemodern evolutionary biology to a crude ‘‘Darwinism’’ consisting of random variation andnatural selection as the sole viable explanation for biological diversity. Examination of thehistorical record demonstrates that such a monolithic explanation was not accepted even byDarwin himself and was furthermore contested and modified in the years immediatelyfollowing 1859. Secondly, the issue of science popularization remains one of greatimportance. Recent work has detailed changes in who popularized scientific knowledgeover the past 200 years and how that knowledge was brought to the public (Bowler 2009;Lightman 2007). Given the problems that face science education particularly in the UnitedStates, the role of popularizers and the efficacy of popularization remains of continuinginterest (National Science Foundation 2012; Lerner et al. 2012). Lastly, theistic interpre-tations of evolution remain popular. Figures such as Kingsley and Gray are the intellectualforefathers of the likes of Kenneth Miller and John Haught who take seriously the claimthat naturalistic evolution and divine action can co-exist (Miller 2007; Haught 2010).While proponents of ‘‘new atheism’’ hold that one must choose between science andreligion, the historical record shows this to be a false dichotomy and it is important forstudents to realize this if they are to approach the scientific evidence for evolution withoutpreconceived hostility.

Much remains to be examined about how ‘‘Darwinism’’ was popularized and policed inthe years after 1859. We hope that the papers herein provide inspiration for futureexaminations of these issues.

Acknowledgments I would like to thank Michael Matthews for soliciting this special edition and for hisguidance, my colleagues for their willingness to work with me and the necessities of the editorial process,and the numerous referees who commented on the submitted manuscripts.

References

Bowler, P. J. (2009). Science for all: The popularization of science in early twentieth-century Britain.Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press.

Haught, J. F. (2010). Making sense of evolution: Darwin, God, and the drama of life. Louisville: West-minster John Knox Press.

Lerner, L. S., Goodenough, U., Lynch, J., Schwartz, M., & Schwartz, R. (2012). The state of state sciencestandards 2012. Washington, D.C.: Thomas B. Fordham Institute.

Lightman, B. (2007). Victorian popularizers of science: Designing nature for new audiences. Chicago andLondon: University of Chicago Press.

Miller, K. R. (2007). Finding Darwin’s God. New York: Harper Perennial.National Science Foundation. (2012). Science and engineering indicators. http://www.nsf.gov/statistics/

seind12. Accessed 11 Feb 2012.

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The Moral Dignity of Inductive Methodand the Reconciliation of Science and Faithin Adam Sedgwick’s Discourse

Richard Bellon

Published online: 1 March 2011! Springer Science+Business Media B.V. 2011

Abstract Science’s inductive method required patient, humble and self-controlledbehavior; Christian revelation demanded the same virtues. The discoveries of science andthe truths of scripture would always harmonize as long as both men of science and men offaith conducted themselves in scrupulous accordance with their duty. So ran a centralargument in A Discourse on the studies of the university (1833; 5th ed, 1850) by AdamSedgwick (1785–1873), the longtime professor of geology at the University of Cambridge.This sanctification of the inductive method provided the foundation for a theistic sciencewhich (in theory) did not subordinate scientific theory to religious doctrine. This visionprovided the foundation for Sedgwick’s lifelong crusade against all forms of evolutionarytheory. Evolution’s impiety, he insisted, resulted from (and exacerbated) a failure tobehave inductively. The fact that Sedgwick (in principle if not always in practice) elevatednorms of behavior above systems of belief had an important and paradoxical consequence.Even though his personal hatred of evolution never cooled, his Discourse nonethelessprovided a dominant model for younger theists to reconcile faith with Charles Darwin’sevolutionary theory.

1 Introduction

The policing and popularizing of science during the Victorian period involved more thanmaking, modifying, limiting and disputing knowledge claims. Scientific ideas were nec-essarily grounded on underlying scientific behavior, and the evaluation of that behaviorwas a constitutive part of intellectual debates. The inductive method functioned as thefundamental guarantor of scientific legitimacy; ideas untested by its stern discipline lackedintellectual and moral sanction. Most fundamentally, induction demands the collection ofparticular observational and experimental results in order to ascend to theoretical con-clusions of increasingly general scope and application. This barebones definition left

R. Bellon (&)Department of History, Lyman Briggs College of Science, Michigan State University,E35 Holmes Hall, East Lansing, MI 48825, USAe-mail: bellonr@msu.edu

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considerable room for ‘‘extensive and essential differences’’ on induction’s more refinedtechnical features, as William Whewell’s long-running disagreement with John Stuart Millis dramatically illustrates (Whewell 1849, p. 3; Snyder 2006). The inductive method didnot, however, gain its preeminent intellectual authority simply by codifying a particular setof technical rules. Inductive philosophy, in all its Victorian variety, applied the universalmoral values of patience, humility, honesty and self control to the specialist study of thenatural world. As Thomas Macaulay (1837, p. 91) insisted, the soundness of an inductiondepended not merely upon adherence to methodological procedures, but on the spirit inwhich those procedures were followed, whether ‘‘foolishly or carelessly’’ or ‘‘withpatience, attention, sagacity, and judgment’’. Science which slipped the inductive yokeinvariably produced error, but it did worse than that; it begot sin by rejecting common duty(Bellon 2011).

For this reason, the promoters of a scientific theory routinely advanced it as the fruit ofright conduct; undermining a theory typically involved indicting the behavior from whichit sprang. The most vicious Victorian scientific controversies did not revolve at their basearound logical interpretations of explanatory adequacy: they were contested most hotly onthe more fundamental ground of who did, and who did not, behave respectably. Expertisemattered, but almost exclusively as a marker of conduct and character. Someone whoadvanced a scientific theory without first acquiring requisite knowledge and skill displayedan impatience incompatible with basic personal integrity; someone who had knowledgeand skill but did not use them to discipline his preconceptions suffered from even moredisfiguring licentiousness and arrogance.

Few Victorian men of science spoke more passionately on behalf of the inductivemethod’s moral authority than the Rev. Adam Sedgwick. Few fought more pugnaciouslyon the public field of science. As a leading geologist, he directly engaged two of thecentury’s most culturally contentious scientific issues—the age of the earth and evolu-tion—and it is here he poses an apparent paradox to modern observers (as he did to some ofhis contemporaries). A scorching contempt for all attempts to circumscribe the earth’santiquity in conformity to a literalist reading of Genesis was matched by a venomoushatred of evolutionary theory. He appears to have oscillated from defending to attackingscientific progress—but this impression is highly misleading. His attacks on literalist andevolutionary theory were grounded on a consistent, and justifiable, conviction that eachviolated the most basic requirements of inductive scientific practice. His uncompromisingdefense of old-earth geology rested upon the corollary insistence that it resulted from agenuinely Christian engagement with the facts of God’s creation. This is not to followSedgwick’s own rhetoric and argue that his theoretical and theological positions followedmeekly in the train of inductive discovery; rather, it is to observe that for him (as for hiscontemporaries more generally) the ideological and the methodological were intertwinedtoo tightly to be separated meaningfully.

Sedgwick’s outrage at the Origin of species (1859)—which Darwin mournfully dis-missed as the ravings of an old man ‘‘rabid with indignation’’ (Burkhardt et al. 1985–2010,vol. 8, p. 141)—does illustrate on one level an inability of a man in his mid-70s to grapplewith the forward press of science. But Sedgwick made a more complex contribution to thepost-Origin debate than his intransigent opposition suggests. He attempted for decades toinvalidate evolutionary theories first and foremost methodologically; evolution was bothuntrue and impious, yes, but its falsity and impiety were the predictable result of unre-strained behavior. Evolutionary beliefs, if left to fester unchallenged in the public sphere,fed a vicious feedback loop: undutiful behavior produced deformed belief, which in turnfurther degraded the moral sense and practical judgment at the heart of honorable conduct.

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This strategy of quashing Darwin’s theory on inductive grounds (and Sedgwick was farfrom the only one to pursue it) had obviously collapsed by the mid-1860s. Yet its basicprinciples did not likewise crumble. Sedgwick’s argument that Christians had a strictreligious duty to accept all legitimate discovery (like the antiquity of the earth) provided amodel for later theists to embrace evolutionary theory, once Darwin and his allies suc-cessfully established evolution inductively.

But this point only becomes clear once we recognize that Sedgwick (in theory, if notalways in practice) policed and popularized scientific ideas by subordinating them to theVictorian mores of inductive scientific behavior. To gain this recognition, we need tofollow him as he mounts the pulpit of Trinity College Chapel on December 17, 1832 todeliver his defining statement on science as an essential moral component of civilization.

2 The Commemoration Sermon

Sedgwick had held the Woodwardian chair of geology at the University of Cambridge for14 years when he preached the annual commemoration of Trinity’s founders and bene-factors at the conclusion of Michaelmas Term in 1832. The ceremonial occasion lent itselfto perfunctory praise of eminent Trinity men living and dead. For 2 h the congregantslistened to something entirely different: a sermon on the role of the university in fosteringculture, morality and faith.

The topic contained deep significance at a time when, as Boyd Hilton (2006, p. 32)notes, ‘‘everything seemed to become political’’. Earlier in the year the British Parliamentaltered the country’s constitutional landscape with passage of the Great Reform Bill. Therancorous debate spilled over into Cambridge, where Sedgwick stood prominently forreform (Clark and Hughes 1890, vol. 1, pp. 372–375). As political drama raged in London,the British Association for the Advancement of Science held its inaugural meetings, in1831 in York, in Oxford the following year. Sedgwick belonged to the circle of reformerswhich integrated this new assembly into the high reaches of Victorian culture (Morrell andThackray 1981). In Cambridge a campaign by Sedgwick and his Whig allies to elect adistinguished man of science to represent their university in Parliament had unraveledshortly before his sermon. New geological and paleontological specimens flooded into theWoodwardian collection. Unfortunately for Sedgwick, its indefatigable curator, the spaceallocated for these materials remained the same cramped, dank and dark room beneath theuniversity library as it had for decades; packing crates overflowed into his private rooms.These arrangements were more than inconvenient: the improper storage of specimensdestroyed essential labels and huge portions of the collection deteriorated into uselessness.1

The French comparative anatomist Georges Cuvier, more responsible than any othernaturalist for laying the theoretical foundation for this collecting activity, had died in May.Sedgwick and his Cambridge allies resolved to keep his functionalist biology vibrantlyalive. The steam locomotive had just begun its astonishingly rapid conquest of the Britishlandscape, to the delight of geologists who flocked to examine the vast rock sectionsexposed in railway cuttings (Freeman 1999, pp. 53–55). Thomas Carlyle hated the railwaysand scorched science allegedly contributing to a relentless, mechanistic dehumanization ofBritish culture (Holmes 2008, pp. 435–436). Half a world away on the day of the sermon,one of Sedgwick’s most talented proteges sailed into Tierra del Fuego aboard HMS Beagle

1 Clark and Hughes (1890, vol. 1, pp. 398–399, 428–429), Sedgwick (1852, pp. 115–116), Sedgwick (1855,p. xiii).

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(Darwin 1845, p. 204). Sedgwick’s dear friend and Trinity-College colleague WilliamWhewell unveiled his neologism ‘‘scientist’’ the following summer (Yeo 1993,pp. 110–111).

Sedgwick’s sermon created a sensation. Whewell collected an undergraduate petitionurging publication. Sedgwick acceded (Clark and Hughes 1890, vol. 1, pp. 399–403). Afterrevision and expansion of the hastily produced original text, A Discourse on the studies ofthe university appeared in November of 1833. It ran through three more editions in lessthan 2 years. A fifth appeared in 1850, inflated with 500 pages of supplementary material.

For all its larger resonances, the Discourse was intimately personal. Sedgwick pursueduniversity reform his entire career, and he did not flinch from championing controversialreforms, even when his activities led to a nasty collision with Whewell.2 But his concernsran far deeper than exams, degrees, curricula and pedagogy. The responsibilities of theuniversity don integrated his life’s two callings: he was ordained in the summer of 1817and won election to Woodwardian chair the following spring.

His evangelical theology remained of a conventional, rationalist and self-assuredtemper, broadly tolerant but distrustful of ritual and higher biblical criticism. He feltsympathy for neither sweeping reform of traditional Anglican orthodoxy nor hideboundattachment to authority. He lived unperturbed (it would seem) by any fundamental doubtabout his faith.3

Science was an altogether more dynamic force in Sedgwick’s life. Geology had entereda period of heroic vitality, and he became (in the recollections of a former student) ‘‘one of[its] ablest pioneers … as well as its most eloquent and spirit-stirring expounder’’ ([Jukes]1859, p. 168). Although an accomplished mathematician, he in fact knew little of the fieldwhen elected to his professorship. The possession of relevant specialist knowledge oftenfell well down the list of criteria for an early nineteenth-century English university chair(Winstanley 1940, p. 183)—it is one ironic mark of his remarkable achievement that hissuccessor in the Woodwardian chair was appointed according to standards which almostcertainly would have barred his own election (O’Connor 2005). But he quickly andzealously mastered his new vocation’s knowledge and craft and took a leadership roleamong the energetic gentlemanly specialists who were reducing earth’s buckled contoursinto an identifiable global order. The distinct bands of rock observable in cuts of theearth—in, say, a coastal cliff, a railway cutting or a quarry face—were not unique localphenomena, but regional manifestations of strata which could be correlated with equivalentformations worldwide. Discovering these global relationships from irregular individuallandforms demanded arduous outdoor activity, frequently uncomfortable, sometimesdangerous. This fieldwork provided the only way to accumulate the local knowledgenecessary for uncovering worldwide geological patterns. He personally developed a finelytuned ability to untangle locally chaotic rock masses into universal strata by visualizing theearth in three dimensions.4 John Herschel compared him to ‘‘a second Thor’’ who has‘‘gone about the world cracking the crowns of rebellious mountains, and reducing the verystocks and stones to order and obedience’’ (Clark and Hughes 1890, vol. 2, p. 73).

Sedgwick and his fellow laborers produced meticulous stratigraphical maps whichtransformed their esoteric classifications of geological formation into panoramic views of

2 Winstanley (1940), Ashby and Anderson (1969), Speakman (1982, pp. 112–122), Leedham-Green (1996,pp. 151–162), Lynch (2000, 2002a, b).3 Clark and Hughes (1890, vol. 2, p. 21), Speakman (1982, pp. 12–13), 134), Oldroyd (2002), Roberts(2009).4 [Jukes] (1859, p. 168), Speakman (1982, pp. 62–63), Secord (1986, pp. 24–38, 57–58).

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the earth’s structure in time and space (Rudwick 1985, pp. 37–60; Secord 1986,pp. 24–38). These maps, Sedgwick observed, erased the surface borders of humannationality and tribe, drawn all too frequently in blood, misery and hatred. Most excitingly,the pace of geological discovery was accelerating. ‘‘As we [geologists] advance on ourway’’, he observed in 1830, ‘‘we gain strength at every step; but new and loftier subjects ofcontemplation are continually rising up before us; so that as yet we have no glimpse of thefurthest boundary to our prospects and our labours’’ (1826–1832b, pp. 297–298).

David Oldroyd (2002) astutely observes that Sedgwick had ‘‘a confident mind in tur-moil’’. His challenge was to protect the stability of orthodox faith without impairingscience’s vibrant freedom of thought and action. He crafted a solution in appeal to the dutyof patient and humble obedience. Religion demanded our surrender to the well-ascertainedand eternal spiritual truths of revelation. Science demanded our submission to the test of anunchanging physical reality. Unlike our knowledge of revelation, our vision of the naturalworld remained radically indistinct: our store of knowledge bare compared to our cav-ernous ignorance, our generalizations incomplete and unconnected, and our imaginationclogged by the extravagancies of fanciful ancient cosmologies. An obedient reverence fortruth in religion (properly perceived) led to a serene stability; in science it demanded areadiness to sweep away the debris of theories broken against the unyielding materialworld. His sermon took for its text the 116th Psalm, with its admonition to offer unto God‘‘the sacrifice of thanksgiving’’ (1833, p. 1). The most reverent sacrifice we can make is therenunciation of conceit, impatience and self sufficiency. The moral qualities demanded bythe sacrificial submission to the will of God are also—and here is the heart of Sedgwick’ssermon—the exact ones essential for the intellectual life fostered by the university.

This message was of course not parochial to Cambridge. A generation of scientificgentlemen born at the end of the eighteenth century—including Whewell, Herschel, JohnStevens Henslow, Michael Faraday, Charles Lyell, David Brewster, William Buckland,Charles Daubeny and Baden Powell—faced the intricate problem of sustaining Britain’smoral and social order without choking off the freedom necessary for science’s incre-mental advancement. Dangers pressed from opposite directions. Radicals expropriatedmodern science’s refusal to hold any theoretical knowledge sacrosanct to justify sweepingthe entire social order clean, including the spiritual truths of revelation. Conservativessought to shackle natural knowledge to political or religious dogma and contemptuouslyanticipated an end to the faddish ‘‘humbug’’ of the British Association’s cultural aspira-tions (Corsi 1988, pp. 131–132; Holmes 2008, p. 453). Sedgwick’s Discourse was one ofthe most prominent attempts in this turbulent environment to enlist science as a force formoderate reform in opposition to apocalyptic revolution and suffocating reaction.

Sedgwick negotiated the affiliation of science and religion as part of the ordinances ofintellectual and spiritual life. The Discourse reviewed the university’s mission under itsthree then-current primary divisions: the natural sciences, ancient literature, and the humansciences (1833, pp. 8–9). He defined these branches not simply as bodies of knowledge, butas complementary modes of intellectual and moral activity.

Invective coursed through the Discourse, particularly in its excoriation of utilitarianism.‘‘Utilitarian philosophy, in destroying the dominion of the moral feelings, offends at onceboth against the law of honour and the law of God’’, he scolded (1833, p. 64). TheDiscourse’s views on political economy circulated widely in intellectual circles (Hilton1991, p. 49). John Stuart Mill (1835) responded with a savage review. Whewell dedicatedhis Philosophy of the inductive sciences to Sedgwick as an elaboration of the Discourse’svision (1847, vol. 1, pp. iii–iv; Yeo 1993, p. 176). Mill recognized the perfect foil in the

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Philosophy and duly turned his fire on Whewell, starting one of the most sustained andconsequential debates in the history of British philosophical thought (Snyder 2006, p. 98).

Literate but largely nonspecialist undergraduates—those who from their ‘‘tender years[have] been taught the languages of Greek and Rome’’—were the chief audience for boththe original sermon and its published elaboration (1833, pp. 28, 102), but Sedgwick wrotewith a clear eye to the expanding class which saw their sons and nephews off to the ancientEnglish universities. His earlier reflections on these issues were delivered to scientificassemblies and published in specialist periodicals (p. 108). The Discourse aspired to muchgreater reach. It was a manifesto from an Anglican stronghold to everyone within its socialand cultural catchment area, as it was seen for better or worse. ‘‘Such is a man whom generalopinion places in the foremost rank of Cambridge minds’’, Mill observed (not kindly).‘‘Such, if we might judge from this specimen, is Cambridge herself’’ (1835, p. 134).

3 Inductive Philosophy, Christian Duty, and Well-Applied Labor

Influential is not, of course, the same as revelatory. The conventional tropes of naturaltheology pervaded the Discourse, as they run through Sedgwick’s thought more generally.‘‘The religion of nature and the religion of the Bible are … in beautiful accordance; and theindications of the Godhead, offered by the one, are well fitted to give us a livelier belief in thepromises of the other’’, he asserted (1833, p. 16); varieties of this platitude stampeded acrossthe intellectual landscape of nineteenth-century Britain. Mill ungenerously but not unjus-tifiably mocked the banality of the Discourse’s natural theology (1835, pp. 100–101).Sedgwick, however, embraced his lack of originality on this point as a positive virtue: itproved that he refrained from challenging established truth simply to sate a restless desire fornovelty or, worse, an impious desire to diminish God’s sovereignty over the natural world.

But we misunderstand Sedgwick’s agenda if we allow his natural theology to obscurethe overarching logic of the Discourse. His primary ambition was to sanctify science’sinductive philosophy as the embodiment of humility, patience, reverence for truth, andsimplicity of character (1833, p. 11). The Christian and the man of science came togetherthrough identical standards of moral habit: ‘‘Perfection (in the limited sense in which theword can be used in speaking of the feeble powers of man) comes only by continued andwell applied labour: and the remark bears on our moral condition as well as our intellect’’(p. 102). The influence was reciprocal: ‘‘our natural perceptions are cleared and elevated bythe light of Christian truth’’ (p. 79); the ‘‘cheerful sobriety of thought’’ fostered by physicalscience prepared the mind to receive ‘‘sound religious impression’’ (p. 88). He explained:

[In] a study of the laws of nature, … as in every other field of labour, no man can put aside the cursepronounced on him—that by the sweat of his brow he shall reap his harvest. Before he can reach thatelevation from whence he may look down upon and comprehend the mysteries of the natural world,his way is steep and toilsome. … The moral capacities of man must not be left out of account in anypart of intellectual discipline. Now these severe studies are on the whole favourable to self-control:for, without fastening on the mind through the passions and the senses, they give it not merely apower of concentration, but save it from the languor and misery arising from vacuity of thought—theorigin of perhaps half the vices of our nature. … The study of the laws of nature may strengthen andexalt the intellectual powers: but strange must be our condition of self-government and tortuous ourhabits of thought, if such studies be allowed to co-exist with self-love and arrogance and intellectualpride (pp. 7–9).

Genuine scientific progress emerged only from the same self-abrogation demanded byChristian duty. We can see the perfect harmony between revelation and creation, if we onlyread both with the same disciplined submission to moral virtue.

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For ‘‘those who are unacquainted with the severe parts of inductive philosophy’’, anappendix gave Isaac Newton’s steps to his theory of universal gravitation as the epitome ofinduction. Sedgwick explained how Newton logically and meticulously built upon thepropositions of planetary motion, which Johannes Kepler had established through‘‘incredible labour’’ and ‘‘direct observations’’, to arrive at his renowned ‘‘singlemechanical law’’. Sedgwick used this celebrated story as a concrete historical example tovalidate his insistence that the methods of science revealed a universe of ‘‘beauty, har-mony, and order’’ (pp. 13, 83–85). His purpose, then, was to give basic moral sanction toinduction, and not analyze the concept of causation, the status of intuition or any of theother deep philosophical issues attacked by Whewell, Herschel and Mill. In any case, asPietro Corsi (1988, p. 198) points out, it is ‘‘difficult to isolate significant or last elementsof common belief’’ between Sedgwick and the other great Victorian expounders ofinductive philosophy.

Natural theology entered his philosophy as the shared point where faith and inductionarrive independently. He stressed that both scriptural exegesis and scientific study had theirown independent integrity, and neither should be breached by the other: ‘‘a study of thenatural world teaches not the truths of revealed religion’’, he insisted, ‘‘nor do the truths ofreligion inform us of the inductions of physical science’’ (pp. 102–104).

As fit the contentious moment in British history, Sedgwick defined theistic science inantagonism to a pair of existential threats. Some men ‘‘have overlooked the aim and end ofrevelation, tortured the book of life out of its proper meaning, and wantonly contrived tobring about a collision between natural phenomena and the word of God’’ (p. 106). Others‘‘would rid themselves of a prescient first cause, by trying to resolve all phenomena into asuccession of constant material actions, ascending into an eternity of past time’’ (p. 23). Heintended to obliterate both classes of villainy.

Sedgwick’s presidential addresses to the Geological Society of London in 1830 and1831 rehearsed the Discourse’s arguments about the moral and social utility of science. Buthe was no longer (as the cliche goes) preaching to the choir in Trinity chapel. He hadendured sermons in the chapel which insisted that knowledge of God was impossibleoutside of scriptural revelation (p. 15). He had to demonstrate, rather than just celebrate,the moral significance of specialized scientific activity for gentlemanly culture.

The implications of geology for interpretation of scripture presented a genuine chal-lenge. As a younger man, Sedgwick too believed in the universal Deluge of Genesis, abelief shed without any apparent angst. Indeed he heralded his recantation as a heroicrenunciation of a ‘‘philosophic heresy’’ in the face of conclusive counterevidence(1826–1832b, pp. 313–314). But not everyone greeted geology’s incineration of traditionalbiblical chronology with self-satisfied equanimity. ‘‘Scriptural geologists’’ emerged to pushback against the perceived assault on traditional biblical authority. Scriptural geology wastoo loose knit to qualify as a unified movement. Its proponents squabbled with each otheras they pursued different social and theological agendas. Their reactions to the new,ostentatiously philosophical school of geology ranged from spittle-flecked fury to bemusedcaution; none, not incidentally, pursued original fieldwork.5 But Sedgwick had no incen-tive to distinguish between these ‘‘monuments of folly’’ (1826–1832a, p. 207).

‘‘No opinion’’, he averred to the Geological fellows in 1830, ‘‘can be heretical but thatwhich is not true’’ (1826–1832a, p. 211). In its naked form this mantra spins apart from thecentrifugal force of its own circularity. The scriptural geologist had the obvious rejoinderresting on his lips: old-earth geology was heretical, thus untrue. At the Geological Society,

5 Lynch (2002a), O’Connor (2007a, pp. 133–145), O’Connor (2007b).

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Sedgwick broke the tautology in part with a predictable appeal to expertise: the men sittingin audience had won their mastery of details through exhaustive mental and physical work,unlike their literalist adversaries outside of the room. He scathingly observed that scripturalgeologists rested far-reaching theoretical claims on laughably elementary factual errors.But he had no intention of debating theory with scriptural geologists. Rather he sought tobanish them altogether from the deliberations over natural knowledge. This required morethan cataloging their mistakes. His merciless technical dissections only served to validate amore fundamental moral case.

‘‘Above all’’, he asserted, the true works of geology ‘‘require a moral elevation, and adignified forbearance, to free the mind from those attractive visions of ancient cosmogony,and those seductions of fanciful hypotheses, by which the history of geology has so oftenbeen degraded’’. This philosophical wisdom, he continued caustically, was obviously loston the dreamers and guessers who were unwilling or unable to submit to the ‘‘slow andtoilsome induction [which is] the only path which leads to physical truth’’. Authorityrested, then, on walking the ‘‘laborious but secure road of honest induction’’ (1826–1832a,pp. 206–207). Geology’s morally elevated claim to truth had nothing to do with dogma,and everything to do with renouncing vanity and living in the harness of work. Thephilosophical geologists’ habit of perseverant and humble toil provided warrant to speakabout the earth’s history; expertise was the consequence and not the cause of their moraland intellectual authority.

This message faced constraints in Trinity chapel. The sermon as a form lent itself poorlyto details of stratigraphical geology. (Appendices to the published Discourse did containsome technical detail, plus the conclusion to his 1830 presidential address). The dangerwas far greater than fidgeting congregants or bored readers. Scriptural geologists routinelyaccused old-earth geologists of impiously subordinating Christian truth to elitist secularstandards (O’Connor 2007a, p. 202, b, p. 391). He had to avoid springing this trap.

The Discourse invoked natural theology: ‘‘geology, like every other science when wellinterpreted, lends its aid to natural religion’’ (1833, p. 22). But this insistence needed to beproven and not just asserted. His inductive natural theology had no inherent superiorityover its literalist rivals on purely doctrinal grounds. Scriptural geologists easily bent theargument from design to their view of biblical authority. Intellectual appeals to naturaltheology as a conceptual system promised at best a stalemate with his literalist foes.

Locating piety in the norms of Christian duty rather than in a particular tradition ofscriptural exegesis solved the problem. Sedgwick insisted that, while the Bible was neverintended to communicate truths about the physical world, ‘‘those glorious passages of theOld Testament, contrasting the power and wisdom of God in the wonders of his creation,with man’s impotence and ignorance, have still, and ever will continue to have, not merelya figurative or poetical, but a literal application’’ (p. 11). This wily appropriation ofliteralism impeached scriptural geologists for acting contrary to the unambiguous dictatesof scripture. Bring your ‘‘rebellious faculties into obedience to the divine will’’, Sedgwickinsists, behave in literal accordance to scripture, and you will never substitute the self-sufficient and mischievous nonsense of scriptural geology for the clear testimony of God’screation (p. 12).

Sedgwick, in a mirror image of his strategy against the scriptural geologist, also accusedthose who would excise theism from science of hypocritical and undignified behavior. Heinsisted that any attempt to read divine providence out of natural phenomena represented adamnable rejection of observation and reason. The marks of God’s direct handworkappeared so clearly in the constitution of the world that no one who adhered to trueinduction could deny them. In other words, the materialist’s claim to be bonded to reality

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was eviscerated by a paradox: the physical world conclusively disproved materialism’smetaphysical assumptions.

This argument required delicate maneuvering, however. ‘‘For we all allow’’, heobserved to the Geological fellows, ‘‘that the primary laws of nature are immutable—thatall we now see is subordinate to those immutable laws’’ (1826–1832b, p. 304). But, as heacknowledged, the attempt ‘‘to thrust the God of nature from his throne’’ depended on anappeal to the unbroken operation of fixed laws as a substitute for divine agency (1833,p. 16). Failure to safeguard the scientific use and metaphysical truth of invariable naturallaw and material causation would bring the edifice of modern inductive science crashingdown (leaving the scriptural geologists and the opponents of natural religion to dance onthe rubble). But granting too much to those laws would validate the materialists’ ejectionof God from the cosmos.

This was not a new dilemma. In the early eighteenth century Gottfried Leibniz ridiculedIsaac Newton’s claim that God routinely intervened to prevent the solar system fromrunning out of gear. What a shoddy workman God must be, Leibniz scoffed, to build such afinicky machine. Samuel Clarke, Newton’s amanuensis in this controversy, fired back thatLeibniz had tumbled into practical atheism by reducing God to a dispensable figurehead:‘‘whosoever contends, that the Course of the World can go on without the Continualdirection of God, the Supreme Governor … does in Effect tend to exclude God out of theWorld’’ (Koyre 1957, pp. 235–238). As a question of scientific fact, the next century tolddecisively against Clarke and Newton’s position. As Sedgwick knew well, the Frenchmathematical astronomer Pierre Simon Laplace exploded the notion that direct divineintervention was necessary to explain observed celestial motion (Hahn 2005, p. 172). Butthe underlying theological issue had lost none of its bite, nor was it limited to scientificcircles. Laymen rehashed this exact argument about balancing the wisdom of divine designagainst the continual governance of an interventionist God (Hilton 2006, p. 454). Thequestion was particularly acute for the evangelical Sedgwick.

Responses flew at readers of the Discourse in a hail of intellectual shrapnel. It wasunphilosophical to assume that material laws were eternal, much less lacking in a divine firstcause, just because their operation was of indeterminate duration. ‘‘The eternity of materialforms is … but a dream of false philosophy, unfounded in reason or analogy’’, he jeered(1833, p. 21). The unspoiled uniformity of natural laws revealed a perfection whose causecould only be divine. The human imagination was adapted so flawlessly to appreciate theglories of material nature that the fit could only have been preordained by God. Humanwellbeing depended absolutely on the constancy of material laws—we could hardly exist ina world where the fundamental conditions of existence were subject to caprice and decay—and it defied logic to imagine such advantages accrued to us by accident (pp. 16–17).

This chain of a priori arguments treaded dangerously close to theological specialpleading. It made dubious sense to argue that nature is harmonious because God exists andthen pivot to insist that God is harmonious because beauty and order pervade nature. To theChristian he could tie off the logic with application to scripture: ‘‘the heavens declare theglory of God, and the firmament sheweth his handy work’’ testified the 19th Psalm (p. 18).But he could place no weight on this appeal, given his insistence that the extrinsic authorityof scriptural testimony was unnecessary for detecting God’s workmanship in the naturalworld (p. 95). And, of course, quoting Psalms hardly vanquished the materialists on theirown stated ground. He faced the fact that the rocks and the stars did not bear the immediatestamp of divine workmanship. The best he could do was push direct providential activity toan un-definable point in the distant past—and this threatened to reduce God to afigurehead.

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The living world removed this ‘‘stumbling block’’ dropped by the materialist. Ifphysical sciences offered only indirect evidence of divine activity, God was never indef-initely removed from the intricate workmanship of life. The function of bodily organs was‘‘entirely separate from the ordinary modes of atomic action’’. ‘‘Contrivance provesdesign’’, he contended; ‘‘this proof is so strong that it never has been and never can begainsaid’’. Divine interference was, in this scheme, neither quiescent nor capricious; ratherGod’s ‘‘anticipating intelligence’’ operated as a ‘‘pervading active principle’’, althoughonly intermittently during the grand sweep of geological time and always according to aregular plan. The most recent manifestations of divine power dated to ‘‘times long anteriorto the records of our existence’’. Scientific investigation provided no evidence thatchemical and mechanical laws change but ample evidence that life had; the uniformity ofnatural law and God’s periodic intervention in the creation of living creatures were thus notstatements of faith, but trains of inductive reasoning from abundant physical evidence.And, since life exists within the seamless fabric of the physical world, the indisputableobservational evidence of divine design in one part warrants reading it into all parts.6

Evolution—a ‘‘phrensied dream’’—provoked Sedgwick’s hatred because it embodiedthe materialist threat to a load-bearing pillar of his theism. Allow that species arise fromthe continuous action of material causes, rather than direct divine interference, and youlose the best evidence ‘‘that God has not created the world and left it to itself, remainingever after a quiescent spectator of his own work’’ (p. 23). But he also disdained thepossibility that God’s invention in nature was ever ‘‘the mere impulse of a capricious will’’;God at all periods ‘‘formed organic beings on the same great plan’’ (1842, pp. 20–21).Were it otherwise, not only would God’s un-patterned activity remain invisible to inductiveinvestigation, but the broader philosophical case for the stability of natural laws would fallunder threat. Sedgwick’s defense of God’s general providence as an explanatory principlecompelled him to reject special providence (Hilton 2000, pp. 187–188). For this reason,Sedgwick could not stomach Lyell’s suggestion that species creation might be going on atthe present, even though Lyell ostentatiously foreswore offering any explanation for howthis might happen (Corsi 1988, pp. 257–258). If Lyell were right, Sedgwick feared,providential activity would degenerate either into a passive mechanical principle or arbi-trary meddling.

Sedgwick nonetheless doggedly insisted that if evolution proved true, in contradictionof all logic and accumulated evidence, it would still not nullify theistic science. Reducingall organic phenomena to a succession of material actions ‘‘would only prove that, in acertain portion of space, God had thought fit to give a constant manifestation of his wisdomand power through an indefinite period of duration’’ (pp. 20–21). Sedgwick had no choicebut to grant this concession. If he allowed that theistic science was under threat from agenuinely inductive generalization (however wildly implausible) he would open himself tothe accusation of enslaving science to metaphysical preoccupations. But it was obvious thathe found the prospect of radically distancing God from his creation so theologicallyrepulsive that in practice he could not conceive of evolution ever being proven inductively.

As with scriptural geology, he was not content simply to win an intellectual debateagainst the evolutionists and materialists. He aimed to invalidate the basic trustworthiness,and thus philosophical legitimacy, of non-theistic science. Here the Discourse’s

6 Sedgwick (1833, pp. 18–27), Sedgwick (1826–1832b, pp. 315–316), Corsi (1988, p. 240), Desmond(1989, pp. 173, 178, 334). I’m indebted to the suggestions of an anonymous referee, which prompted me torecognize the importance of punctuated progression in Sedgwick’s understanding of the paleontologicalrecord.

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exhortation to cultivate the moral faculties provided the decisive context for his argument.Anyone who denied providential intelligence in the physical world demonstrated a morallydisfiguring intellectual pride that blinded them to the unequivocal verdict of observationand reason. Clearly, such a narcissist had removed all proper restraint on his scientificbehavior, and thus sacrificed the trust of his fellows.

While he censured several scriptural geologists by name (p. 106), evolutionists andother materialists only lurked namelessly in the shadows. They presented a more severeproblem: unlike the scriptural geologists, not all evolutionists were scientifically incom-petent. For example, the notorious French evolutionist Etienne Geoffroy St.-Hilaire mighthave advanced damnably fantastical hypotheses, but Sedgwick nonetheless granted that hewas, at least in a limited sense, a good anatomist (1845, p. 31). He addressed the pointdirectly in the Discourse: ‘‘It would, indeed, be ridiculous to say, that all living philoso-phers are religious men’’ (1833, p. 107). He responded in part by noting that no field ofinquiry, including theology, was free of narrow-minded and sinful practitioners. Genuineaccomplishment in a narrow furrow was not inconsistent with a lack of mental balanceneeded to tame bad passions. Science, Sedgwick insisted, did not produce more than itsshare of infidels, and among it votaries ‘‘may be found some who shine forth as illustriouspatterns of Christian holiness’’ (pp. 103–107). He also noted that a few rare ancient Greekand Roman philosophers did rise above their societies’ impure superstitions. While theycould not achieve full moral grace in the absence of Christian revelation, their patient andlaborious approach to natural knowledge allowed a select few pagan philosophers to atleast grope towards natural religion (pp. 35–36, 92–93, 104). Sedgwick in each case madea strategic retreat from the strong case for induction’s moral significance in order topreserve the absolute necessity for Christian belief. He had to tread a delicate line:investing inductive inquiry with too little sanctity would diminish it as a moral counter-weight to the enemies of science; grant it too much, and it would acquire an odious moralsufficiency that would rival rather than complement traditional Christian piety.

‘‘Knowledge is not enough’’, Sedgwick insisted, ‘‘unless feeling and habits go alongwith it, to give it meaning, and to carry it into practical effect’’ (p. 104). This captures hisconviction that theistic science ultimately rested on norms of behavior and not on theparticularities of either religious dogma or scientific theory. Natural theological knowledgewas thus the crown and not the foundation of his reconciliation of science and religion. Headmonished the Christian to abandon his pride as scripture dictated, and his heart wouldopen to the truth of inductive scientific discovery. He admonished the man of science toobey the rules of the inductive method, and his eyes would see the truth of scripture. Thescriptural geologist and the materialist lived in conflict with patient and humble obedienceto eternal truth. Both failed the test of character and conduct which was the shared entail ofreligion and science. Both were worse than wrong.

4 The Discourse in Battle

The Discourse issued aggressive challenges and predictably received aggressive responses.Mill was infuriated by what he saw as the Discourse’s highhanded and grotesque

philosophical mischaracterizations. But he was playing for higher stakes than simplydefending the moral reputation of utilitarianism (which, in any case, he considered indesperate need of refurbishment) (Snyder 2006, pp. 14–17). He believed that Sedgwick’srepeated invocations of divine moral law smothered any genuine impulse to reform byshielding preferred political and economic arrangements from rational critique. Mill never

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disputed Sedgwick’s emphasis on the virtue of patient self control; on the contrary, he wasincensed by the attempt to appropriate moral character as the exclusive property of theism.He aggressively contested the Discourse on its hallowed ground by denigrating Sedgwick’scomprehension of the inductive method and capacity for accuracy (1835, pp. 98–99, 106).Mill had no intention of ceding the lexicon of reform to what he considered a self-satisfiedAnglican elite cozily ensconced in the ancient universities.

The scriptural geologists predictably did not appreciate their cuffing, either. A Cam-bridge-trained clergyman named Henry Cole launched an impassioned counterattack inGeology Subversive of Divine Revelation. He hissed (inaccurately) that Sedgwick invitedmen to know God without recourse to scripture. For this reason the principles of theDiscourse stood ‘‘in direct opposition to, and contradiction of, the eternal truth of divineRevelation,—and that, therefore, are false, dangerous and impious!’’ (Roberts 2009, p. 164;Sedgwick 1850, p. 132).

In the preface to the fourth edition Sedgwick blithely defended his attack on utilitarianmoral philosophy as a thoroughly fair assessment of the facts. His dismissal of Cole waseven curter: ‘‘Had he made himself acquainted even with the simplest elements of thesubject, it might have been well to reply to him: but he is at present so far removed beyondthe reach of any reasonable argument, that his writings must be passed over without furthernotice’’ (1835, pp. xi–xii). There, for the moment, matters stood. By the end of the 1830sfissures had started to open between Sedgwick and his friend and collaborator RoderickMurchison, which led to an increasingly bitter dispute over their rival stratigraphic clas-sifications.7 Debate among specialists, even when as heated as this one became, demandeda relatively behind-closed-door style of disputation. Sedgwick returned his considerablepolemical talents to the public arena in 1844 under provocation from an ecclesiasticscriptural geologist and an anonymous evolutionist (Secord 2000, pp. 231–247). Bothcontroversies touched intimately on the core concerns of the Discourse.

The first fight broke out in York in late September. The Rev. William Cockburn, theelderly but spry Dean of York, used his local eminence to get onto the British Association’sprogram. A large crowd turned up for his paper, anticipating a brawling good time.Cockburn did not disappoint in his blistering rebuke of non-literalist geology, which heinsisted led to atheism (Young 1985, p. 7). He denied that strata from the Silurian onwardhad been laid down over eons. Rather, his suitably sacred alternative posited a global flood,caused by underwater volcanic eruptions, which created these formations over the courseof a few catastrophic weeks. He explained each stratum’s characteristic fossils by theability of different creatures to escape the onrushing waters (pterodactyls, it turned out,proved rather logy fliers and were engulfed well before reaching high ground) (Anonymous1844, p. 903).

Sedgwick counterpunched in the comment period. The ninety-minute riposte, with itswell judged mix of philosophical discourse, stern factual analysis, scathing ridicule andself-deprecating humor, verified his reputation as science’s most charismatic orator. He atfirst put Cockburn’s factual absurdities to one side, attacking instead the absolute inductiveillegitimacy of the entire project. The British Association met to verify facts and evaluategeneralizations in light of current knowledge, Sedgwick condescendingly explained. Itavoided mingling observations of physical reality with personal or partisan political, moralor religious views. Cockburn desecrated these fundamental values by spinning wild cos-mologies unsupported by even a crumb of new evidence. ‘‘We should reject [any paper likeCockburn’s] altogether, as in its nature unfit for our notice’’, Sedgwick thundered.

7 Speakman (1982, pp. 74–85), Rudwick (1985), Secord (1986).

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He concluded on a note of triumphant piety with the rote assurance that ‘‘truth could neverbe opposed to itself; and the perception of truth, whether physical or moral, was a per-ception of one portion of the will of God’’ (Anonymous 1844, pp. 903–904; Chambers1844b, pp. 322–323). Although the castigation of Cockburn read harshly enough in theAthenaeum, one observer concluded that the medium of ink and paper failed to capture thepiquancy of Sedgwick’s ‘‘scornful bitterness’’ (Clark and Hughes 1890, vol. 2, p. 78).

Among the reporters covering the York meeting was a successful Scottish publishernamed Robert Chambers. His account of the meeting in Chambers’ Edinburgh Journal castSedgwick as a slayer of mischief, while lamenting that this ‘‘unprofitable controversy’’ hadattracted so much gawking (Chambers 1844b, pp. 322–323). Chambers, however, wasabout to spark an even hotter conflagration. He was the anonymous author of Vestiges ofthe Natural History of Creation, published a fortnight after the British Association meeting(Secord 2000). Vestiges offered a sweeping cosmological synthesis that painted the historyof the universe as a grand pageant of progressive development, from the dawn of a greatnebular fire mist to man’s ascension to the pinnacle of creation (Chambers 1844a).

Sedgwick, like most in his circle, responded with acidic indignation. Here was thematerialism he had warned against in the Discourse, embodied in all its moral and intel-lectual deformity—and readers were lapping up copies by the dozen. He agreed to reviewVestiges for the Edinburgh review. The number for July of 1845 opened with his 85-pagebroadside (Secord 2000, p. 240). Like his attack on Cockburn, Sedgwick’s dissection ofVestiges marched the philosophy of the Discourse into combat, with one revealing overlay.Sedgwick noted maliciously that he originally mistook the anonymous author for a womanbecause of the book’s lacy disregard for the leather discipline of sober inductive investi-gation. What went without saying in the Discourse becomes explicit here: the Christianbehavior Sedgwick extolled was an exclusively masculine responsibility. Women had theirown nature and their own softer duties of sympathy, moral discrimination and grace, onesimpossibly suited to the ‘‘enormous and continued labour’’ required by science. Theanonymous author repudiated masculine behavior by presuming to speak about the entirestructure of the material world without patiently and humbly acquiring true knowledgeabout any of its particulars. In contrast, geological fieldworkers (like himself) ‘‘spent yearsof active life’’ among the strata and constructed their theories on what they found, not onwhat they longed to see (1845, pp. 2–4, 10, 31).

Many of the liberals who had celebrated Sedgwick’s defenestration of Cockburn reactedwith horror to his bilious attempt to toss Vestiges out of the adjoining window (the reviewwas unsigned, but Sedgwick’s hand was widely recognized). But his position throughoutremained absolutely consistent with the guiding principle of the Discourse: the valuesinherent in inductive philosophy provided the only grounding for physical and moralknowledge. Sedgwick’s viciousness was sparked in part from genuine anger, in part from areasonable fear that a failure to take a stern line against Vestiges would fortify the inev-itable conservative counterreaction from literalists like Cockburn (Secord 2000,pp. 241–247).

This is not to deny the obvious: Sedgwick’s animus to both transmutation and scripturalgeology had deep religious roots. Nonetheless, Cockburn’s geology and Vestiges bothgenuinely fell far outside of the standards of acceptable scientific practice, and forSedgwick this was never merely a convenient point of attack. In his eyes these episodesproved that the abandonment of masculine Christian discipline resulted in both bad scienceand bad religion. He wrote privately to Lyell that if Vestiges be true, ‘‘the labours of soberinduction are in vain; religion is a lie; human law is a mass of folly, and a base injustice;morality is moonshine; our labours for the black people of Africa were works of madmen;

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and man and woman are only better beasts!’’ (Clark and Hughes 1890, vol. 2, p. 84). Helisted sober induction first because it was primary; if its values fell, religion, morals, socialorder and human kindness would tumble in train. This was the lesson of the Discoursepressed into battle.

The Discourse itself reentered the fray with a fifth edition in 1850. Sedgwick refused inthe 1830s to turn the work into ‘‘a formal Scientific Dissertation’’ (1835, p. x). He reversedthis resolution, with a vengeance. He appended a 442-page ‘‘preface’’ and 145 pages ofother supplemental material. As he wrote to a friend, his original sermon was now sur-rounded by reflections on ‘‘Geology, Psychology, Theology, Deism, Atheism, Pantheism,Procreation, Transmutation, Parthenogenesis, Academic training, Popery & Tomfoolery’’(Secord 1986, p. 214). His crusade against Vestiges occupied much of the enormous newpreface. His much briefer refutation of Cole’s ‘‘disordered imagination’’ served as a proxyattack against Cockburn and the whole of scriptural geology (1850, pp. 131–133). Butreengaging these old foes was not the exclusive purpose of the new edition.

The excitement generated by Vestiges reflected larger cultural ferment; the pace ofintellectual change had accelerated in Britain since the fourth edition of the Discourseappeared in 1835. Ideas that had formerly lurked disgracefully in the shadows were gainingcurrency in respectable circles (Browne 2003, pp. 18–19). No doubt even more troublingfrom Sedgwick’s (1845, p. 3) perspective was the way Vestiges and its ilk threatened tocontaminate ‘‘the public who are not able to judge from their own knowledge’’ withmischievous and nonsensical metaphysical forms of unbelief. He feared that intelligentyoung middleclass women were particularly vulnerable to corruption (Desmond 1989,p. 177; Secord 2000, p. 240). The principles of the Discourse thus remained more germanethan ever. But the odd packaging injured the new edition’s effectiveness. The originalsermon was meant to stand as a lighthouse amidst turbulent seas; instead, as Sedgwickacknowledged, it could easily appear to be ‘‘a grain of wheat between two millstones’’(Clark and Hughes 1890, vol. 1, p. 402, vol. 2, p. 193).

Sedgwick could not attack unbelief indiscriminately without risking collateral damage.The mathematical astronomer Laplace illustrates his challenge. Laplace exerted a profoundinfluence on European science across several scientific domains (Hahn 2005). His CelestialMechanics set the standard for mathematical mechanics (Whewell 1847, vol. 1, p. 230).Sedgwick knew of the rumors of the old astronomer’s atheism when he visited him on hisdeathbed in 1827. The notorious anecdote of Laplace denying the need for the ‘‘hypoth-esis’’ of God in celestial mechanics circulated among Sedgwick’s friends.8 His opponentsknew Laplace’s reputation, too. The Oxford Tractarian John Henry Newman, unimpressedby the moral claims of science, insisted archly that no one ‘‘was made to do any secret actof self-denial … by all the lore of the infidel La Place’’ (Schaffer 1989, p. 143).9

Nonetheless the fifth edition of the Discourse placed the Frenchman in the heroiccompany of Newton, Galileo and Cuvier as an exemplar of inductive practice (1850,p. 230). Sedgwick certainly wanted to avoid vilifying the architect of some of science’smost elegant and useful mathematical tools. Laplace fortunately worked in a field that didnot directly threaten Sedgwick’s theism. The search for final causes did not form alegitimate role in investigating purely physical phenomena, Sedgwick insisted (1850,p. xiv), so materialistic astronomy by itself was tolerable. Laplace also studiously avoidedovertly metaphysical discussion, despite the often far-reaching philosophical import of his

8 Clark and Hughes (1890, vol. 1, p. 273), Yeo (1993, p. 116), Hahn (2005, p. 172).9 Sedgwick considered the theological principles of Newman and his fellow Tractarians as deluded,sophistical and dishonest. Clark and Hughes (1890, vol. 2, pp. 93–94).

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work (Hahn 2005, pp. 107–108, 120–121). The dry technocratic facade which helped himsurvive the convulsions of the French Revolution also made him palatable to his piousEnglish admirers.

Yet, for all of this, the difficulty of accounting for his atheism remained. Sedgwickmitigated the problem with an anecdote from his encounter with the dying astronomer.Laplace, Sedgwick reported, declared that Cambridge should never relinquish its institu-tionalized religious character. ‘‘I have lived long enough to know’’, Laplace said, ‘‘what Idid not at one time believe, that no society can be upheld in happiness and honour withoutthe sentiments of religion’’. Sedgwick conceded that Laplace’s opinion might have beenmotivated by nothing more profound than ‘‘the principles of worldly wisdom’’, but itnonetheless carried great truth (1850, pp. 129–130). There were two implicit lessons: thetruth of theism was so palpable that truly philosophical investigators would arrive at it,even if the atheist would only see it dimly through a lens of worldliness; and, Laplace’ssevere inductive achievements in science had disciplined his mind in a way that at leastpartially redeemed him spiritually. Sedgwick in essence treated Laplace as a pagan phi-losopher, someone whose admirable intellectual qualities elevated a moral nature none-theless necessarily incomplete from lack of Christian faith.

Sedgwick granted no such concession to the German transcendental biologist LorenzOken. Allowing matter, motion and force to govern celestial motion was one thing;allowing exclusively mechanical explanations to descend into the sublunary sphere of lifeendangered Sedgwick’s theism by impinging directly on the argument from design.Oken’s sin was not materialism, however, but its extreme opposite, an idealism whichsought the foundation of all knowledge in pure reason. Idealism corroded the principles ofscientific study by removing the yoke of laborious induction (and by implication thequalities of Christian duty). Yet Oken, as Sedgwick admitted, had pursed ‘‘experimentalstudies of the sternest kind’’ and his work contained genuine knowledge and valuableoriginality. But the German tortured his findings into the misshapen impress of his ide-alistic fantasies, including evolution. Sedgwick shrewdly culled 25-pages worth ofextravagant statements from Oken’s Physiophilosophy to show ‘‘the depths of mysticism,pantheistic profanity, and arrant nonsense, into which a very clever, inventive, and well-informed physiologist may sink’’. In the end he degraded the pure reason he claimed torevere by depriving it of the guidance and ministration of experience (1850, p. cii–cv, cc,ccx–ccxi, 222–246, 253).

Oken’s appearance as a case study of scientific misconduct sent a veiled warning toSedgwick’s younger London colleague, the comparative anatomist Richard Owen (Rupke1994, pp. 188–204). Owen was moving sharply away from Cuvierian functionalist biology,so comfortably suited to the argument from design, and towards the transcendental conceptof the archetype. Sedgwick unambiguously cautioned Owen to travel this road with hes-itation, and in particular to walk back his recent hints about searching for the origin ofspecies in secondary causes (1850, pp. ccxiiivccxiv).

This blunt use of Oken to constrain Owen demonstrated that it was all too tempting tobesmirch an unwelcome idea on allegedly impartial methodological grounds when theactual objection was ideological. Sedgwick’s logic followed a simple syllogism: trans-mutation was outrageous, inductive investigation destroyed outrageous ideas, and thereforeone could never arrive at transmutation through induction. The pose of humble submissionto the inductive method unquestionably allowed Sedgwick to advance ideological agendasunder a cloak of inductive neutrality. He and the other gentlemanly savants who foundedthe British Association trumpeted their mission’s putatively nonpartisan and nonsectarian

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character, even while pursuing an ideology of moderate reform with deep political, socialand economic import (Morrell and Thackray 1981, pp. 32–33).

But, as self-serving as it frequently was, the rhetorical invocation of inductive virtuewas not consciously cynical. For all of the ideologically loaded character of the call forpatient, toilsome and long-continued research, the gentlemen of science lived up to thisself-imposed obligation with severe sincerity—just as the scriptural geologists and theauthor of Vestiges failed these gruelingly exacting standards. The issue became much morecomplex, and much more susceptible to humbug, when it became entangled in the work ofexpert investigators like Laplace and Oken, where welcome competence met unwelcomemetaphysics. But when Sedgwick rejected genuinely inductive generalizations on theo-logical grounds, he did so through self delusion rather than hypocritical calculation. Theideals of the Discourse were corruptible, not corrupt.

The publication of Darwin’s Origin of species (1859), nearly 27 years after Sedgwick’scommemoration sermon in Trinity College Chapel, provided the acid test for those ideals.If we misinterpret the Discourse as a simple vehicle for an antievolutionary natural the-ology, then it seems clear that Darwin pulverized his mentor’s principles. But when werecognize that in fact Sedgwick bridged science and religion with an appeal to humble andpatient inductive discipline, the Discourse’s place in Victorian debates over species originacquires a much more complex cast.

5 Darwin, Induction and the True Spirit of Christ

Darwin’s death in April of 1882—he outlived Sedgwick by less than 9 years—attractedwidespread national attention. George Prothero, Canon of Westminster and Chaplain-in-Ordinary to the Queen, preached a high-profile tribute to Darwin in Westminster Abbey.Darwin, Prothero announced, was ‘‘the greatest man of science of his day, but was soentirely a stranger to intellectual pride and arrogance that he stated with the utmostmodesty opinions of the truth of which he was himself convinced, but which, he wasaware, could not be universally agreeable or acceptable. Surely in such a man lived thatcharity which is the very essence of the true spirit of Christ’’ (Anonymous 1882, p. 418).

The same day Canon Henry Parry Liddon reflected on Darwin’s life from the pulpit ofSt. Paul’s Cathedral. He lauded Darwin’s ‘‘patience and care with which he observed andregistered minute single facts’’. Religious men had initially reacted to the Origin and theDescent of Man as necessarily hostile to religion, but ‘‘a closer study has generallymodified any such impression’’ (1882, pp. 28–29).

Frederic William Farrar, another Canon of Westminster, served as one of Darwin’spallbearers and preached the funeral sermon at the evening Nave Service. Even though henever fully accepted biological evolution, his sermon placed Darwin, ‘‘this clear-eyedstudent of nature, so docile and so patient, so childlike and full of love’’, among those theluminaries of science ‘‘who have not only served humanity by their genius, but have alsobrightened its ideal by holy lives’’. Farrar pleaded for ‘‘a little patience, a little humility, anlittle brotherly love’’ from both science and church and reassured men of science that ‘‘thespirit of mediæval ecclesiasticism is dead’’ (1891, pp. 296, 305, 308; R Farrar 1904,pp. 109–110).

Given the religious hostility which initially greeted the Origin, these three sermonsdemonstrated evolution’s remarkable progress within British intellectual life. The canons’praise was not isolated. Churchmen representing the breadth of ecclesiastical opinion

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joined the outpouring of praise for the departed naturalist (Moore 1982, pp. 102–103,108–109).

This did not represent a repudiation of Sedgwick’s ideal of theistic science. On thecontrary, it shows that the vision Sedgwick articulated a half century earlier in TrinityCollege Chapel still exerted tremendous cultural force.

Sedgwick would not have seen it this way, of course. For him the Origin was even moremischievous than Vestiges: the same ‘‘dish of rank materialism’’ but served up without the‘‘ignorant absurdities’’. Darwin’s theory pushed us further away from a relationship with apersonal ordaining power by relegating the Creator to quiescence, at best. He scoldedDarwin both privately and publicly for abandoning induction (Clark and Hughes 1890, vol.2, pp. 356–360; Browne 2003, pp. 93–94, 108, 117–118). And he was far from alone.Many of Darwin’s detractors indicted the Origin as unfettered speculation. Owen (1860)and Samuel Wilberforce (1860), who drew on Sedgwick’s Discourse for support (pp. 250,256, 263), both made this charge conspicuously in leading quarterlies. These accusationsalso ricocheted through the notorious 1860 meeting of the British Association at Oxford(Hesketh 2009; Depew 2010, pp. 337–339).

The strategy that worked so effectively against scriptural geologists and Vestigesachieved some initial success against Darwin, but then quickly lost traction (Bellon 2011).Darwin had absorbed the values of persevering induction to his core—he spent 8 yearsclassifying barnacles, after all. He also understood the cultural potency of patient labor.The Origin’s first paragraph ostentatiously assured readers that he had arrived at his theoryonly after long years of patient and steady investigation (1859, p. 1). He was positionedperfectly to rebut accusations of inductive misconduct in the most decisive way possible:through original scientific research. In the early 1860s he explicitly used his theory toprovide the first scientifically adequate explanation of fertilization systems in plants. Thecrown jewel of this effort was his exhaustively researched book on the evolution ofcrossing mechanisms in orchids (Darwin 1862); this unlocked ‘‘the riddle of the flower’’, asone German botanist later observed (Bellon 2009, p. 375). George Bentham, the hard-headed systematic botanist who as president barred discussion of evolutionary theory atLinnean Society meetings, lauded Darwin’s orchid work as the embodiment of ‘‘patient’’natural-history research (Bellon 2003, pp. 289–290).

Sedgwick, by now deep in his seventies, managed to close his eyes to the new facts andresearch projects which accumulated under the guidance of Darwin’s theory (Clark andHughes 1890, vol. 2, pp. 411–412). He suffered ill-health, an ever-more envelopingloneliness as friends and family died, and the gnawing frustrations of his conflict withMurchison, which had alienated him from his beloved Geological Society and much of thecommunity of geologists (Sedgwick 1855, pp. xc–xci; Speakman 1982, pp. 82, 123–124):he was in no position, intellectually or emotionally, to back away from a lifetime’s anti-evolutionism, even if he did retreat somewhat on the ideologically subsidiary question ofman’s geological antiquity (Clark and Hughes 1890, vol. 2, p. 440).

Younger theistic men of science did manage to accommodate evolution (Brooke 2010,pp. 399–400). Some, like the devout botanist Asa Gray, Darwin’s redoubtable Americanchampion, responded to the Origin with unmitigated enthusiasm, while assiduously dis-associating it from the materialism he pinned on Thomas Huxley and his set (Dupree 1988,p. 340). Gray advanced the case for natural selection along two flanks: arguing that it wascompatible with natural theology (1876a) and that it was the theory of choice amongworking naturalists (1876b). By the early 1870s even supporters of theistic science whohad flinched at the Origin recognized that they could no longer stand steadfast againstevolution without degenerating into latter-day scriptural geologists.

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This accommodation was greased by expert disagreement over natural selection, whichleft a theistically-friendly goal-directed evolution a viable scientific possibility (Bowler2007, pp. 138–148). Liddon had erected the theological scaffolding for an accommodationwith evolution in an Oxford sermon delivered in 1871 (1891, vol. 2, p. 32), so the sub-stance of his praise for Darwin more than a decade later was not impromptu. He declared tohis St. Paul congregants that, if God produced species by progressive evolution, ‘‘it is stillHis creative activity’’. Knowledge of evolution thus still provided knowledge of God(1882, p. 28). Yet he still privately nursed misgivings about even this degree of com-promise. But he was soon bucked up by George Douglas Campbell, the eighth Duke ofArgyll, who had served as one of Darwin’s pallbearers. His popular The Reign of Law(1867) was a manifesto of theistic evolution. He reassured Liddon that acceptance ofevolution did not entail embracing the more noxiously materialistic implications of Dar-win’s theory. In the end, Liddon felt sufficiently comforted to record in his diary that ‘‘weowe Darwin much for his courageous adherence to Theistic truths under a great deal ofpressure, as I cannot doubt’’ (Johnston 1904, pp. 275–276).

The prefatory note to Liddon’s published sermon appropriated Darwin for theism inalmost the exact way Sedgwick earlier rehabilitated Laplace. Liddon appreciated Darwin’sconcession in the Descent that the ‘‘highest intellects that have ever lived’’ have had an‘‘ennobling’’ belief in the existence of an omnipotent God, even if Liddon insisted onsterner stuff than Darwin’s ‘‘timid Theism’’. Darwin honorably refused to place hisimprimatur on materialistic attacks on faith. He instead placed his science in moral harnessthrough his ‘‘life-long diligence as a reverent observer’’ (1882, pp. 4, 8–9, 15). Liddon’ssermon did not disguise his hopeful anticipation that subsequent scientific discovery wouldknock the pins out of the more materialistic aspects of evolutionary theory, particularly asthey touched human origins; but Darwin’s reverent habits inoculated his science from anylegitimate preemptory challenges on exclusively religious grounds. While the evangelicalSedgwick and the high-church Liddon disagreed on key theological and liturgical issues, itis remarkable how often Liddon’s sermons in the 1860s and 1870s echoed the core themesof the Discourse when they touched on issues of science: a contempt for materialism andpantheism, a belief in God’s sustaining presence in his creation, the illegitimacy ofrejecting well ascertained physical facts on theological grounds, the dangers of prematurespeculation, and above all the insistence that humble and perseverant mental habits werethe shared bequest of scientific practice and Christian duty (Liddon 1891, vol. 1, pp. 8, 21,158, 201–202, vol. 2, pp. 17–18, 143, 172–173).

The post-Origin accommodation between evolution and theistic science was not purelydefensive. We should not miss the subtext of Farrar and Prothero’s remarks. Left unspo-ken, but certainly not unheard, was the continuation of their sentiment: Darwin lived in aspirit of humility and charity, unlike the aggressive materialists who have attempted tousurp his banner. When Farrar sued for an honorable truce, he placed the onus for peace onthe scientific antagonists to theism. Liddon made this point explicitly in the preface to hispublished sermon on Darwin (1882, p. 9). By embracing Darwin, the theists laid claim topatience, charity and humility—values which they could deploy as a weapon. Argyllaggressively turned Darwin’s charitable and forbearing image against Huxley, Haeckel,Spencer and other sundry ‘‘ultra-Darwinian enthusiasts’’ and ‘‘Darwin’s worshippers (asdistinguished from his more intelligent admirers)’’. Darwin, Argyll lamented, had beenmade into a great, infallible ‘‘Idol of the scientific world’’—a circumstance which hecontrasted ruefully with the ‘‘splendid candour’’ of the great naturalist himself (1887a,pp. 305, 307, 1887b, p. 761). Huxley responded with as much equanimity as Mill showedmore than 50 years earlier in response to the Discourse. Huxley knew the playbook, too,

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and shot back as a spokesman ‘‘of those whose lives have been occupied not in talkingabout science, but in toiling, sometimes with success and sometimes with failure, to getsome real work done’’ (1887, p. 640). The battles over theistic science thus rumbled on—asdisputants fought to colonize the coveted territory of patient, charitable, humble behavioras the property of their party.

John Lynch finds that the Discourse represents ‘‘the confusion (and inherent con-tradictions) within the mind of many Victorians in the period before Darwin’’ (2002a, b,p. xii). He is wrong about confusion. Sedgwick’s position was robustly coherent: the moralhabit of inductive investigation would always vigorously support theistic science andinvalidate bigotry and infidelity. This was both a statement of faith and an inductive claim.Perhaps this dual nature represents the contradiction Lynch sees, but I would characterize itinstead as a particularly Victorian tragedy. Sedgwick, one of the century’s most eloquentand passionate evangelists for the inductive method, had based his most significantspiritual belief on a false induction. Darwin should not have been able to produce the typeof knowledge the Discourse condemned by obeying the type of behavior it extolled.

The crisis confronted Sedgwick in its full force only as an elderly man, so it is notsurprising he was unable to face it, much less solve it. While a younger Sedgwick mightwell have responded differently, it is far too pat to depict his blanket rejection of Darwin’stheory as mere geriatric obstinacy. Argyll, Liddon, Gray and other theistic evolutionistspaid a theological price for their accommodation with Darwin, as Sedgwick painfullyunderstood. Evolution further diminished God’s active supervision of his creation. Thequestion Clarke identified in the dispute with Leibniz became ever more acute: how far canyou remove God from the immediate superintendence of physical reality before youdepose him from the world altogether? At what point does God’s providence become sogeneral that it ceases to be providential at all?

The Discourse prohibited us from ‘‘making a world after a pattern of our own’’ (1833,p. 105). This logic allowed no stopping point for intellectual or religious scruple. Sedgwickwas not supple enough to follow his own philosophy. But others were. By finding unitybetween science and religion in the moral habits shared by inductive practice and Christianduty, rather than in the conceptual unity of scientific generalizations and scriptural exe-gesis, post-Origin theists accommodated their faith to Darwin’s ‘‘reverent’’ observations.

The Discourse helped to open a path for a Christian acceptance of evolution. That wasits lasting triumph—and Sedgwick’s most bitter defeat.

Acknowledgments I am deeply indebted to Vicky Bellon, Paul Brinkman, John Lynch and John Wallerfor their help and suggestions on this manuscript. Michael Matthews provided essential editorial guidanceand three anonymous referees provided generous and clear-eyed advice.

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Sedgwick, A. (1855). Introduction to: A synopsis of the classification of the British palæozoic rocks by AdamSedgwick; with a systematic description of the British Palæozoic fossils, in the Geological Museum ofthe University of Cambridge, by Frederick McCoy. London: John Parker.

Snyder, L. J. (2006). Reforming philosophy: A Victorian debate on science and society. Chicago: Universityof Chicago Press.

Speakman, C. (1982). Adam Sedgwick: Geologist and Dalesman. Heathfield: Broad Oak Press.

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Whewell, W. (1847). Philosophy of the inductive sciences, founded on their history (2nd ed., Vol. 2).London: John Parker.

Whewell, W. (1849). Of induction, with especial reference to Mr. J. Stuart Mill’s ‘‘System of logic’’.London: John Parker.

Wilberforce, S. (1860). Darwin’s origin of species. Quarterly Review, 108, 225–264.Winstanley, D. A. (1940). Early Victorian Cambridge. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Yeo, R. (1993). Defining science: William Whewell, natural knowledge, and public debate in early Victorian

Britain. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Young, R. M. (1985). Darwin’s metaphor: Nature’s place in Victorian culture. Cambridge: Cambridge

University Press.

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Making a Theist out of Darwin: Asa Gray’sPost-Darwinian Natural Theology

T. Russell Hunter

Published online: 6 November 2011! Springer Science+Business Media B.V. 2011

Abstract In March of 1860 the eminent Harvard Botanist and orthodox Christian AsaGray began promoting the Origin of Species in hopes of securing a fair examination ofDarwin’s evolutionary theory among theistic naturalists. To this end, Gray sought todemonstrate that Darwin had not written atheistically and that his theory of evolution bynatural selection had not presented any new scientific or theological difficulties for tra-ditional Christian belief. From his personal correspondence with the author of the Origin,Gray well knew that Darwin did not affirm God’s ‘‘particular’’ design of nature but con-ceded to the possibility that evolution proceeded according to ‘‘designed laws.’’ From thisconcession, Gray attempted to develop a post-Darwinian natural theology which encour-aged theistic naturalists to view God’s design of nature through the evolutionary process ina manner similar to the way in which they viewed God’s Providential interaction withhuman history. Indeed, securing a fair reading of the Origin was not Gray’s sole aim as apromoter of Darwinian ideas. In Darwin’s theory of natural selection, Gray believed he haddiscovered the means by which a more robust natural theological conception of the livingand evolving natural world could be developed. In this paper I outline Gray’s efforts toproduce and popularize a theistic interpretation of Darwinian theory in order to correctvarious misconceptions concerning Gray’s natural theological views and their role in theDarwinian Revolution.

1 Introduction

The eminent nineteenth-century botanist Asa Gray (1810–1888) is chiefly rememberedtoday for his role as an early supporter of the Origin of Species, his illuminating corre-spondence with Charles Darwin about design, and his attempt to construct a post-Darwinian natural theology (Moore 1979; Livingstone 1984; Beatty 2006, 2008). A highlyaccomplished scientist in his own right, Gray was the first professor of natural history atHarvard University, the author of a number of widely read botanical texts, founder of the

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first major American herbarium, and the primary link between old and new world botanicalcollectors and flora taxonomists (Dupree 1988). In standard accounts of the ‘DarwinianRevolution,’ Gray is depicted in a variety of ways and for various reasons. In popularliterature today he is often cited as a case in point refutation of the claim that the historicalrelationship between Darwinism and Christianity has been one of constant conflict (Gould1992; Zimmer 2001; Collins 2006). In historical literature Gray is remembered primarilyfor his role as Darwin’s chief American proponent in the decades immediately followingthe Origin’s publication in 1859 (Menand 2001; Numbers 1998; Ruse 2000). In morepolemical literature, Gray is even discussed, erroneously, as a sort of precursor to modern-day Intelligent Design theory (Tipler 2004: 126–127).1

Accounts devoted to telling the story of Darwin’s arrival in America emphasize Gray’swork in securing the publication of an official American edition of the Origin, authoring itsfirst positive American review, his composition of a number of essays presenting thescientific case for evolution, and his engagement in both private and public forums wherehe defended ‘‘the eminent ability of Mr. Darwin’s work’’ (Gray 1860a: 12). The highlightof this story is Gray’s effective dismantling of the creationist paradigm and anti-evolutionarguments promoted by the Swiss-born American emigre, Louis Agassiz (1807–1873). Inthis account, Gray is a high-ranking professional scientist who plays a leading role in theinevitable triumph of Darwinian evolution (Croce 1995; Hoeveler 2007).

However, in accounts of the Darwinian revolution which focus on the dismantling ofnatural theology by a more compelling Darwinian logic, Gray plays an almost oppositerole. In this story he is portrayed as a leading representative of the nineteenth-centuryargument for design (Ghiselin 1996; Gillespie 1979). This account focuses primarily on thecorrespondence between Darwin and Gray and their cordial debates about design. Darwinwas notoriously guarded when it came to his theological beliefs and never included a full-on refutation of the argument for design in his published work (although the Origin can beread as one long argument against the theory of independent special creation and hisVariation of Animals and Plants under Domestication (1868) contains an argument againstthe idea of Designer-guided variations in the evolutionary process). The Darwin-Graycorrespondence accordingly takes center stage in biographical treatments of the greatnaturalist’s somewhat ‘muddled’ thoughts about design and the theological implications ofhis theory (this is literally the case in the 2007 theatrical production Re:Design based onDarwin and Gray’s correspondence). While this story often reveals much about Darwin,Gray is at times depicted merely as a foil for Darwin’s remarks. Gray has even been usedby partisan authors engaging in present day controversies concerning the history of evo-lution and its relationship to the concept of intelligent design as a convenient stand-infigure for eighteenth-century natural theologian William Paley (1743–1805), who was notalive to debate Darwin or adapt his thoughts about design to the ascendency of naturalselection (Irvine 1955; Russet 1976; Dennett 1996; Miles 2001).

The principal goal of this article is to examine Gray’s promotional work on behalf ofDarwinism and his formulation of a set of arguments designed to forward a theisticinterpretation of evolutionary theory with the goal of advancing a post-Darwinian naturaltheology. Unlike Darwin, Gray wrote extensively on the relationship between evolutionarytheory and design. His essays, collected and published in 1876 as Darwiniana, sought to

1 Readers of this essay should note throughout the distinctive differences between Asa Gray’s naturaltheological interpretation of Darwinian evolution as a providentially designed system of creation with theinterpretations of present day ‘‘design theorists’’ who explicitly contrast their natural theological conceptionof nature with Darwinian theory.

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explain and defend Darwin’s theory while attempting to retain an argument for design inthe natural world and demonstrate that the project of natural theology had not lost any of itsimperative force in natural history.2 To achieve this goal, Gray attempted to show thatDarwin had not written with atheistic intentions and that his theory had not created anynew or peculiar difficulties for Christian theology. In fact, Gray believed that Darwin hadinadvertently produced a theory which enhanced, and likely rescued, the project of naturaltheology.

The arguments which Gray fashioned to these ends have been overshadowed by his one-time suggestion in 1860 that Darwin assume in the philosophy of his hypothesis thatvariations in nature were ‘‘led along certain beneficial lines’’ by the Creator (Gray 1860e:121). However, the belief in God-guided variations was not a central aspect of Gray’s post-Darwinian natural theology and Gray never officially adopted this position or argued for itsnecessity (Hunter 2009). The belief that Gray did adopt this suggestion as a key feature inhis post-Darwinian natural theology has likely resulted from the fact that Darwin attributedthis view to Gray throughout the 1860’s and expressly aimed his rejection of the idea asGray’s invention, in his 1868 work on the Variation of Animals and Plants underDomestication (Burkhardt 1994: 135, 162; Darwin 1868). After Darwin’s public rejectionof the idea in 1868, Gray wrote to him specifically denying that this was his position at all,complaining that Darwin had ‘‘put him on the defence’’ by his ‘‘reference to an oldhazardous remark’’ (Jane Gray 1894: 562; Burkhardt vol 16: 537). Gray also agreed thatDarwin’s ‘‘stone-house argument’’ against the idea of guided variations was ‘‘unanswer-able,’’ but reminded Darwin that the falsity of such a concept did not ultimately affect thecase for design. Gray also categorically denied this position was his own during a series oflectures before Yale Seminarians in 1880 (later published as Natural Science and Religion1880) and described the idea as ‘‘preposterous’’ to his friend George Frederick Wright(Hunter 2009: 52–55). Scholars have nonetheless focused more on Gray’s ‘‘hazardousremark’’ than on his more fully expressed arguments on behalf of the consistency of naturalselection and natural theology, and Darwinism and Christian theology. Instead of beingwidely known for these philosophical arguments and his theological arguments on behalfof the consistency of natural selection and natural theology, Gray is almost invariablyportrayed as a once-useful theistic proponent of the Origin, who eventually posited the‘‘superfluous’’ idea of God-guided variations in order to retain his supernatural belief in adesigning intelligence (Mayr 1991: 59; Desmond and Moore 1991: 501–3; Desmond 1999:474; Ruse 1996: 250, 1997: 246–7; Bowler and Morus 2005: 357, see especially PeterBowler’s biographical entry on Gray in Ruse and Travis (eds.) 2009: 617–618).

I have argued more fully elsewhere against the proposition that Gray’s post-Darwiniannatural theology required guided variations (Hunter 2009). Here I wish to focus on thatwhich was fundamental to Gray’s post-Darwinian natural theology and outline the argu-ments he constructed on behalf of Darwin’s theory in order to encourage Christian men ofscience to gainfully and consistently adopt evolution by natural selection in such a way thatthey need not modify or deny any of their previously held theological convictions. Indeed,Gray argued that Darwin’s view of nature exhibited a philosophical kinship with Christiantheology that promised to transform natural theology and place it on a more solid Christianfoundation. The central claim of Gray’s argument here was his conviction that theists could

2 These essays spanned from 1860 to 1876 and were brought together and published by the Americangeologist and theologian George Frederick Wright. Here I will cite the original publication dates of eachessay but supply page references as they appear in A. Hunter Dupree’s easily accessible 1963 paperbackedition of Darwiniana.

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adopt any of three theologically Christian conceptions of the way God acted as the efficientcause of nature which could be viewed as consistent with Darwinian evolution. To thisGray added that all of these conceptions were theologically orthodox and had been con-sistently held by Christians over time.

Gray described his own conception of God’s efficient cause at work in the evolutionaryprocess as a ‘‘theory of the immediate, orderly, and constant, however infinitely diversified,action of the intelligent efficient Cause’’ (Gray 1860e: 130). He understood Darwin ashaving described a process of ‘‘Divine works effected—step by step,’’ occurring in a‘‘system of nature’’ that was ‘‘superintended’’ and ‘‘in the largest sense designedly’’brought forth (Wright Papers: Gray to Wright, August 14, 1875; Gray 1860a: 121; Dupree1963: 42). Adopting a natural theological interpretation of evolutionary theory in thissense, Gray believed, promised to ‘‘obviate’’ and ‘‘diminish’’ many of the difficultiesassociated with the ‘‘former narrow conceptions’’ of design then widely adopted byworking naturalists (Gray 1876: 308). In his work, Gray thus sought to develop a ‘‘rightevolutionary teleology’’ which embraced Darwinism as offering a teleological explanationfor the apparent waste, suffering, and seemingly useless aspects in nature. In what heeventually described as Darwin’s ‘‘far-reaching and comprehensive teleology,’’ Grayargued that what nineteenth-century writers referred to as the ‘‘scum of creation’’ found itsfinal ‘‘explanation and reason of being’’ in the Darwinian ‘‘economy of nature’’ (Gray1876: 297; Hunter 2009).

Here I begin with a brief examination of Gray’s acceptance of evolutionary theory andoutline his earliest attempts to make a theist out of Darwin and an argument for design outof his theory. I will show that Gray drew heavily from his personal correspondence withDarwin in the construction of these arguments and that as a result, Darwin himself came togenerally understand and accept the conclusions which Gray made on behalf of the con-sistency of natural selection and natural theology. As we will see below, Darwin activelypromoted the spread of Gray’s views in the decade following the Origin’s publication.I will also suggest that Darwin’s statement in the third publication of the Origin onwardthat he ‘‘saw no good reason why the views’’ presented in his work ‘‘should shock thereligious feelings of anyone,’’ is best understood as a result of his correspondence withGray and that his life-long conviction that a man could be ‘‘an ardent theist & an evolu-tionist,’’ proceeded from his acceptance of Gray’s philosophical arguments on behalf of apost-Darwinian natural theology (Darwin 1862: 481; CCD Online, Letter 12041 to JohnFordyce, 7 May 1879).

2 Making a Theist out of Darwin

Asa Gray was 49 years old when he read the Origin of Species in the final weeks of 1859(Dupree 1988: 267–68). Four years previously he began receiving letters from Darwin withquestions pertaining to the geographical distribution of North American plants whichinitiated a long and fruitful scientific correspondence that persisted until the end of Dar-win’s life in 1882 (Burckhardt vol 5: 305, 334–335). Along with their mutual friend JosephHooker (1817–1911), the British botanist, Darwin and Gray eagerly discussed themounting difficulties associated with defining ‘‘species’’ in light of steadily increasingknowledge documenting the global geographical distribution of plants and animals (Her-mann 1999). As their discussion progressed, Darwin discerned in Gray an openness to thepossibility that species were not immutable, and in July of 1857, he revealed to his newAmerican friend his ‘‘heterodox’’ belief that there were ‘‘no such things as independently

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created species’’ in nature, but only ‘‘strongly defined varieties.’’ He also confided in Graythat he was ‘‘pretty clearly’’ convinced that he had discovered ‘‘the means used by nature tochange her species & adapt them to the wondrous & exquisitely beautiful contingencies towhich every living being is exposed’’ (CCD online: letter 2125).

Gray responded to this claim with a confession of his own regarding the ‘orthodox’doctrines of species immutability and independent special creationism. Gray explained that‘‘no naturalist’’ could work at systematic botany as long as he had ‘‘without having manymisgivings about the definiteness of species,’’ and informed Darwin that he would be‘‘greatly interested’’ in whatever ‘‘good, tangible facts’’ he had collected on the law ofvariation and means of transmutation (CCD Online: letter 2104). Not long after, Darwinsent Gray a six-page sketch of his theory of evolution by natural selection, admitting himinto a small group of naturalists to whom Darwin revealed the details of his theory prior to1858.3 It was this very sketch which would later be used to shore up Darwin’s priority asdiscoverer of natural selection over the naturalist A. R. Wallace (Browne 2002).

This early awareness of evolution by natural selection no doubt prepared Gray for hisleading role as a promoter of Darwin’s theory in America. Even prior to 1859 Gray beganchampioning Darwin’s views at meetings of the American Academy of Sciences anddemonstrating their usefulness in his own scientific research which examined the rela-tionship between North American and Japanese flora. In 1860 he published five essaysexpounding upon the Origin, and participated in both public and private scientific meetingswhere he defended the scientific and theological legitimacy of Darwin’s hypothesis(Dupree 1963: ix; 1988: 249–251; Hermann 1999).

Gray devoted his first review of the Origin to presenting ‘‘a fair account’’ of Darwin’s‘‘method and argument,’’ and praised Darwin for producing a book ‘‘exceedingly com-pact,’’ ‘‘readable,’’ and ‘‘charmed’’ with ‘‘fairness.’’ Repeatedly describing the Origin as astrictly scientific work, Gray insisted that ‘‘by its science it must stand or fall’’ (Gray1860a: 49). In a manner similar to Darwin’s, Gray highlighted the explanatory power ofnatural selection and drew attention to the way that descent with modification illuminatedmany facts hitherto inexplicable by the doctrine of independent special creation (Gray1860a: 12, 49). ‘‘A spirited conflict among opinions of every grade’’ would follow in theOrigin’s wake, Gray prophesied, and requested that his readers not ‘‘pass judgment’’ tooquickly on a work to which ‘‘twenty of the best years of the life of a most able naturalist’’had been devoted (Gray 1860a: 7–8).

While the scientific world decided the fate of Darwin’s theory, Gray assured his readersthat debating the Origin’s strengths and weaknesses would be both ‘‘useful to science’’ andin no way ‘‘harmful to religion.’’ In the event that evolutionary theory were established, heexplained, it would be done so ‘‘on a solid theistic ground’’ (Gray 1860a: 43). Indeed, Grayreasoned that it would be ‘‘far easier to vindicate a theistic character for the derivativetheory, than to establish the theory itself upon adequate scientific evidence’’ (Gray 1860a:47). That is, Gray felt that it would be easier to demonstrate the compatibility of Darwinianscience with theistic belief than it would be to demonstrate the scientific validity ofDarwin’s theory in general.

While Gray agreed with critics who argued that a theory which proposed that all ofnature had not in some way been the work of a designing intelligence would be ‘‘doubtless

3 However, John van Wyhe has recently demonstrated that Darwin’s being at work on a theory of speciestransmutation was certainly no great secret among his naturalist compatriots (see van Wyhe’s 2007). Theextent to which many naturalists knew the details of Darwin’s theory of natural selection is still up fordebate.

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tantamount to atheism,’’ he disagreed that this was a correct reading of the Origin (Gray1860e: 122). On Gray’s reading, Darwin had not written atheistically and the Originpresented an account of nature that was consistent with a genuinely theistic world view.Gray thus began his vindication of Darwin by pointing out the Origin’s clear disavowal ofspontaneous generation: ‘‘life… originally breathed into a few forms or into one,’’ and thestatement that laws had been ‘‘impressed on matter by the Creator’’ (Darwin 1859: 489,491). He then highlighted the unmistakably theistic quotations which Darwin selected forthe Origin’s front matter. These were from the philosopher and natural theologian WilliamWhewell, the influential seventeenth-century philosopher and statesman Francis Bacon,and beginning in the third edition (of which Gray had received an advanced copy), theChristian apologist Bishop Joseph Butler. Finally, he directed readers to the Origin’sostensibly theistic final paragraph, wherein Darwin wrote that life had been ‘‘originallybreathed into a few forms or into one.’’ These lines of textual evidence alone suggested thatDarwin admitted ‘‘a supernatural beginning of life on earth’’ and existence of a primarycause behind the secondary laws which governed the evolution of life on earth (Gray1860a: 45, b: 77; quoting Darwin 1859: 490). He concluded that those who claimedDarwin denied all Divine agency in nature were simply mistaken.

When Darwin first read Gray’s statements to this effect, he did not deny them in theleast. In response to Gray’s first review Darwin declared that Gray’s ‘‘admirable’’ essaywas ‘‘far the best’’ review which had appeared on the subject (Burkhardt vol 8). Writing tohis future bulldog T.H. Huxley, Darwin asserted that Gray was ‘‘the thorough master ofsubject,’’ and to his scientific mentor Charles Lyell, he intoned that Gray was ‘‘one of thebest reasoners & writers’’ he had ever read, adding that ‘‘he knows my Book, as well as Ido myself’’ (Burkhardt vol 8: 294, 306).

However, returning to Gray’s arguments in the latter months of 1860, Darwin felt theneed to address some of his statements regarding what he labeled the ‘‘quasi-theologicalcontroversy’’ surrounding his work (Burkhardt vol 8: 247, 371, 391). While Darwinthanked Gray for his reviews and welcomed their ‘‘right good service’’ to the promotion ofhis work, he also harbored significant reservations about some of the theistic claims pre-sented on his behalf. Darwin agreed that he ‘‘had no intention to write atheistically,’’ butadmitted that he found the theological questions raised by his theory both ‘‘painful,’’ and‘‘too profound for the human intellect’’ (Burkhardt vol 8: 224). What troubled Darwin mostabout Gray’s theistic interpretation of evolutionary theory were the moral implications ofascribing the evolutionary process to an all-wise, all-powerful, and benevolent Creator Godwho foresaw, or preordained, all things and events in nature. When he thought through thisinterpretation, Darwin found himself in ‘‘an uncomfortable puzzle something analogouswith ‘necessity & Free-will’ or the ‘Origin of evil’’’ (Burkhardt vol. 8: 106, see also 161).

Darwin was puzzled as to why God would bother creating organisms gradually through asystem of secondary laws predicated on an endless struggle for survival if he were able toconstruct them out of nothing by a direct act of special creation. That is, why would Goddesignedly choose to create living beings through the ‘‘clumsy, wasteful, blundering, low,and horribly cruel’’ war of nature, which he had described in his book? Darwin admitted thathis ‘‘mind was in a muddle’’ on the subject and confessed that he could not see how thenatural world could have possibly resulted from ‘‘brute force’’ alone, but ‘‘owned that hecould not see as plainly as others’’ the necessity of ‘‘inferring design as the cause of anyparticular thing or event’’ in nature. Though he ‘‘wished’’ he could see ‘‘evidence of design& beneficence’’ in the world, there was simply ‘‘too much misery’’ to warrant any suchdeduction (Burkhardt vol 8:224). He pointed to the existence of organisms such as theIchneumon wasp, a creature which on Gray’s theistic evolutionary view must have been

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designed by Providence for the seemingly malevolent purpose of laying its eggs within thebodies of living caterpillars. If naturalists like Gray attributed exquisite contrivances such asthe mammalian eye to providence, Darwin reasoned that they would also have to attributethe many cruel devices in nature to the same designing intelligence (Burkhardt vol 8: 224).

Writing again to Gray on the third of July, Darwin asked whether Gray believed thatwhen ‘‘an innocent & good man’’ was struck by lightning, that he had been done sodesignedly, and if so, whether he also believed that God expressly designed and broughtabout the death of every particular gnat, snapped up by every particular swallow. If the lifeand death of each particular gnat was not the result of design, Darwin saw ‘‘no good reasonto believe’’ anything different when it came to the life and death of any particular man. Yethe remained unconvinced that ‘‘this wonderful universe & especially the nature of man’’could have resulted from chance alone. As he confessed to Gray, he could not persuadehimself ‘‘that electricity acts, that the tree grows, that man aspires to loftiest conceptions allfrom blind, brute force.’’ Darwin’s tentative answer to this ‘‘uncomfortable puzzle’’ was tobelieve that all of nature resulted from ‘‘designed laws, with the details, whether good orbad, left to the working out of what we may call chance.’’ He was hardly satisfied with thisanswer and continued to refer to himself as in a ‘‘muddle about ‘designed laws’ &‘undesigned consequences’’’ (Burkhardt vol 8: 273–275, for details here see Beatty 2006).

Gray’s response to this letter has not been found but we can reasonably infer that hefound this problem far less vexing than his theologically ‘heterodox’ friend. As themoderate Calvinist Christian Gray referred to himself, he was a ‘‘philosophically con-vinced theist,’’ and acceptor of the ‘‘creed commonly called the Nicene’’ (Dupree 1963:xxi). This meant, at least propositionally, that Gray believed that God was ‘‘maker ofheaven and earth, and of all things visible and invisible’’ and had foreordained all things‘‘before the foundations of the world’’ (The Nicene Creed; Ephesians 1:5). In relation to theorigin and existence of evil, Gray believed in a God who ‘‘worked all things together forgood’’, and this apparently included the existence and activity of Ichnuemon Wasps, gnatsnapping swallows, and the phenomenon of lightning. He had placed his faith in thesovereignty of One who was ‘‘before all things’’ and in whom ‘‘all things held together,’’and to accept that He worked through hidden or mysterious causes in order to bring aboutHis will, was part and parcel of Gray’s confessed religious beliefs (Gray 1860a: 46–49;Romans 8: 28; Colossians 1: 17).

3 Darwin: ‘‘A Believer in General, but not Particular Providence’’

The most significant thing Gray took from his theological discussion with Darwin was theconclusion that the Origin and evolutionary theory in general had not put forward any newarguments against traditional Christian belief. The great naturalist’s ‘‘quasi-theological’’letters had only highlighted longstanding philosophical quandaries associated withbelieving in an all-powerful, all-knowing, benevolent God. The problem of evil and theincommensurability of free-will and predestination had long been grist for the theologicalmill, and Christian theists like Gray either did not feel they sufficiently refuted the case forChristianity or had simply accepted Christianity in spite of them. Rather than becomingdiscouraged by Darwin’s remarks, Gray turned them to his rhetorical advantage.

In his subsequent essays on evolution, Gray wrote with even more certainty regardingDarwin’s theism, positively identifying him as a believer in ‘‘general, but not in particularProvidence’’ (Gray 1860e: 105). In his letters, Darwin had stated his belief in designed lawsjust as Gray had originally inferred from his exegesis of the Origin. Now Gray could

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expressly state that Darwin did not intend or believe that his theory eradicated all designfrom nature. Gray even strategically smuggled Darwin’s own concession to a belief in‘‘designed laws with undesigned consequences’’ within his essays under the guise of thatwhich ‘‘most people’’ believed about nature. ‘‘Most people,’’ Gray explained, believed thatsome things and events in nature were designed and others were not and even though suchpeople found themselves in ‘‘a hopeless maze’’ whenever they undertook to define theirposition, they ought not be ‘‘stigmatized as atheistically disposed’’ (Burkhardt vol 8: 299;Gray 1860e: 105). Those stuck in such a maze, or as Darwin had called it an ‘‘uncomfortablepuzzle,’’ were at minimum believers ‘‘in general, but not in particular Providence.’’ Graycontinued this line by arguing that critics who failed to ‘‘recognize the distinction’’ betweensomeone who denied ‘‘anything was specially designed to be what it is,’’ and someone whodenied ‘‘the Designer supernaturally or immediately made it so’’ could not justly define theposition that God worked through ‘‘designed laws’’ as an atheistic position (Gray 1860e:113–114). This was simply a philosophical error and did nothing to refute Gray’s originalargument that the Origin was a generally theistic work (Gray 1860e: 131–132).

Gray derived another rhetorical argument from his correspondence with Darwinregarding the philosophical neutrality and theological acceptability of evolutionary theorywhich he worked into his next essay on the Christian compatibility of Darwinian theory.Seeing that Darwin’s own difficulties with a theistic interpretation of evolution were onlythe same philosophical problems ‘‘long argued out’’ by theists and certainly not unique to aDarwinian view of nature, Gray attempted to demonstrate that the Origin had created nonew difficulties for Christian theology. Only the same difficulties that plagued Divineprovidence remained (Gray 1860e: 125–128). The Origin ‘‘did not raise these perturbingspirits,’’ Gray wrote, and Darwin’s discovery would not likely put them to rest. Gray thusreasoned that Christians who had accepted Divine providence could easily adopt Darwin’stheory, while merely accepting the ‘‘same mysteries in nature as in providence.’’ In fact,Gray suggested that this was an asset of accepting Darwinism rather than a liability. A post-Darwinian natural theology encountering ‘‘the very same difficulties in the material that itdoes in the moral world is just what ought to be expected,’’ he wrote (Gray 1860e: 125).

That Darwin or anyone else was puzzled by such difficulties ought not preclude theistswho had already accepted a providential interpretation of God’s sovereignty over natureand human history. This was a theological preference and not a scientific debate, and whileDarwin and Gray approached this topic from nearly opposite theological perspectives, theyagreed that it ultimately came down to each individual’s chosen philosophical position. AsGray described the situation, ‘‘Darwinian evolution’’ was ‘‘neither theistical nor nonthe-istical. Its relations to the question of design belong to the natural theologian, or, in thelarger sense, to the philosopher’’ (Gray 1876: 310). Darwin, an admittedly less philo-sophical naturalist, agreed. As he ended a letter to Gray in May 1860, Darwin felt that‘‘each man’’ could only ‘‘hope & believe’’ in what he could (Burkhardt vol 8: 224.).

But what of making a positive case for design so central to the natural theologicaltradition? If Gray was to retain a natural theological conception of the living world fol-lowing the triumph of Darwinian theory, he would have to do more than prove that Darwinhad not destroyed faith in the Christian religion.

4 The Evidence of Design is in the Ends, not the Means

Gray argued that the inference to design was rooted in the mere existence and observationof design-like contrivances in nature regardless of the mode of their production. Of

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contrivances such as the human eye and hand he wrote they ‘‘compel belief with a force notappreciably short of demonstration’’ by exhibiting ‘‘clear evidence of design’’ in their‘‘adaptations to the conditions of existence’’ (Gray 1860e: 124). It did not matter whetherthey had been produced by an immediate supernatural act or resulted from the interactionof secondary natural causes. Gray elaborated:

the evidence of design from structure and adaptation is furnished complete by the individual animalor plant itself, and that our knowledge or our ignorance of the history of its formation or mode ofproduction adds nothing to it and takes nothing away. We infer design from certain arrangements andresults; and we have no other way of ascertaining it. Testimony, unless infallible, cannot prove it, andis out of the question here. Testimony is not the appropriate proof of design: adaptation to purpose is.(Gray 1860e: 124. Emphasis in original).

Adopting Darwinian theory did not change the fact that Nature’s ‘‘exquisite adapta-tions’’ declared the existence, glory, and wonder of their Creator. In fact, Gray argued thatthe arrangement of natural laws which governed their production only added to thisconclusion. Gray believed that a post-Darwinian natural theology grounded in the idea thatGod designed laws of nature which brought about his intentions presented a ‘‘higherconception’’ of Creation, and a more noble form of natural theology; one which promisedto supplant former ‘‘narrow conceptions’’ of design wedded to the immutability of species(Gray 1876: 308).4

Gray contended that Darwin had merely fathomed another ‘‘possibility of nature underthe Deity’’ and attempted to show that the traditional argument for design had not beendestroyed, but enhanced. He reminded his readers that Paley himself, ‘‘in his celebratedanalogy with the watch,’’ had insisted that if a ‘‘timepiece were so constructed as toproduce other similar watches, after a manner of generation in animals, the argument fromdesign would be all the stronger’’ (Gray 1860a: 46). Natural theologians following Darwin,Gray in turn explained, now possessed just such a watch; a ‘‘watch which sometimesproduces better watches, and contrivances adapted to successive conditions, and so atlength turns out a chronometer, a town clock, or a series of organisms of the same type’’(Gray 1860a: 46).

Gray also argued that an inference to design could still be made from contrivancesproduced by the evolutionary process. In a published dialogue on the relationship betweenDesign and Necessity in 1860, Gray constructed an analogy between the evolutionaryprocess and the workings of a modern textile factory. Inviting his readers to imagine theresponse of a ‘‘woman of a past generation’’ who had been presented with a piece of clothproduced by a modern factory, Gray reasoned that she would certainly attribute the cloth’sproduction to design, believing it to have been ‘‘carded, spun, and woven by hand’’ (Gray1860d: 70). Gray then asked what the woman’s response would be if she were told that thecloth had been produced by an unattended mechanical process that never employed the

4 In the introduction of this article, I noted that Gray has sometimes been falsely employed as a stand-infigure for the pre-Darwinian natural theologian William Paley. Here it is necessary to clarify that Paleyhimself has often been wrongly conceived and falsely portrayed in the standard ‘‘Darwin versus Design’’historical narrative. As Adam Shapiro has recently demonstrated (Shapiro 2009), Paley’s own naturaltheological arguments were centered on detecting the presence of ‘‘purpose’’ in nature, and did not rely oninferences concerning the means by which such purposes were produced. That is, long before Gray, Paleyhad posited that an ‘‘empirically-argued theology’’ could infer and embrace a Designer who operated not incontravention, but through, natural law. As Shapiro convincingly points out, Paley was not concerned in hisNatural Theology (1908) to argue that the origin of complicated structures proved the existence of adesigner, but believed that the mere exhibition of purpose in natural objects effectively argued for a positiveinference to design. Just as Gray concludes in the above quotations, Paley thought that the means by whichpurposeful objects came into being were actually irrelevant to the inference to design in nature.

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activity of human hands. Hearing this, would the woman regard the cloth as not havingbeen designed for a purpose? Gray argued that she certainly would not. More than this,Gray believed that were she were given detailed information about ‘‘the theory of cardingmachines, spinning-jennies, and power-looms,’’ the woman would, as a result, not onlyview the cloth as a product of design, but believe that its design had been ‘‘attended by ahigher conception’’ and a ‘‘wisdom, skill, and power greatly beyond anything she hadpreviously conceived possible.’’ (Gray 1860d: 70).

By this analogy, Gray believed he had demonstrated that the inference to design was notactually predicated upon any particular method of creation, but solely upon the recognitionof adaptation to function. Specifically, Gray thought this argument showed that theinference to design did not require any hands-on interference, tinkering, or divine inter-ventions from the Creator. In this analogy he was also proposing the idea that matter andthe natural laws which acted on matter might have been designed to do the work of anintelligent first cause who did not subsequently interfere in his created order. Organisms,on such a model, could still be considered designed in a manner similar to the cloth in hisanalogy. If the evolutionary process were viewed as a system of designed laws analogousto the designed interactions of carding machines, spinning jennies, and power looms,nature, like a factory, could be interpreted as having been originally set up by a designingintelligence.

Finally, Gray pointed out that the design argument had always been ‘‘drawn fromanimals produced by generation,’’ rather than by miraculous or instantaneous creation.‘‘The whole argument in natural theology’’ he explained, proceeded upon the ground thatthe inference to design based upon observations of present day contrivances was ‘‘just asvalid now, in individuals produced through natural generation, as it would have been in thecase of the first man, supernaturally created’’ (Gray 1860e: 123). For Gray it was puzzlingas to why the human eye or anything else which was used to argue for design would beunderstood as any less designed on account of its having developed through naturalgeneration. That an organ or organism had developed over time did not change the fact thatit could present ‘‘valid and clear evidence of design’’ (Gray 1860e: 124, 125).

If extending the development of a contrivance backwards in natural history invalidatedthe argument for design, Gray wondered why the argument had not already been invali-dated. All former arguments for design were themselves drawn from contrivances whichcame about through a purely natural process of embryological development. It was the eye,not the process by which the eye had been produced, that convinced not only Gray but allprevious natural theologians of the inference to design. All the facts about the eye,remained just as they had always been (Gray 1860d: 69).

To illustrate his point further, Gray asked readers to transfer the question of design,‘‘from the origination of species to the origination of individuals’’ which occurred, aseverybody agreed, ‘‘naturally’’ (Gray 1860e: 122). If Gray’s readers considered the naturalbirth of each individual a work of design, why could they not also consider the naturalgeneration of the human species in the same manner? Gray’s argument here was simple. Ifthe argument ‘‘from structure to design’’ was ‘‘not invalidated by our present knowledge’’that all individual organisms ‘‘developed from a single organic cell,’’ it was not invalidatedby the ‘‘supposition of an analogous natural descent, through a long line of connectedforms’’ (Gray 1860e: 123). And this was true even if that line of descent began with asingle primordial cell.

This argument remained a standard feature of Gray’s essays from 1860 to the end of hiscareer. As Gray wrote succinctly in the concluding chapter of his 1876 collection of essays,Darwiniana:

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The Darwinian theory implies that the birth and development of a species are as natural as those of anindividual, are facts of the same kind in a higher order. The alleged proof of the absence of designfrom it amounts to a simple reiteration of the statement, with particulars. Now, the marks of con-trivance in the structure of animals used not to be questioned because of their coming in the way ofbirth and development. It is curious that a further extension of this birth and development should beheld to disprove them. It appears to us that all this is begging the question against design in Nature,instead of proving that it may be dispensed with (Gray 1876: 316).

The argument for design was never predicated on how design was achieved, but onwhether design had been achieved, and Gray understood the discovery of natural selectionas having merely revealed that which was formerly thought to have been designed‘‘directly and at once,’’ had actually been designed ‘‘indirectly and successively’’ (Gray1860d: 70). Just as Gray concluded that Darwin’s theory created no new difficulties forChristian theology, he similarly believed that the evolutionary process did nothing tonullify the logical structure or compelling force behind the argument for design.

5 Gray’s Natural Selection not Inconsistent with Natural Theology

It was on account of these arguments that Gray believed Christian men of science had noreason to fear Darwin’s evolutionary theory. It was not the case that Gray believed theisticnaturalists had to modify Darwin’s science or their theological beliefs in any way. Hisargument that natural selection was not inconsistent with natural theology rested upon thephilosophical assertion that theists could adopt any of three conceptions of the Creator’saction as the efficient cause of nature which were consistent with both Darwinism andChristian belief.

Throughout his writings Gray contended that the foremost reason behind denounce-ments of evolution as atheistic had proceeded from a clash, not between science andreligion, but between conflicting philosophical conceptions of the interaction between Godand nature. Gray decried notions such as those holding that God could only createorganisms in nature de novo or ex nihilo as ‘‘more crude, obscure, and discordant, thanthey need be.’’ In Gray’s opinion these notions were guilty of being ‘‘theistic to excess’’(Gray 1860a: 43). Indeed, Gray attributed the fact that many of Darwin’s readers failed toeven properly interpret his theory to the popularity of such views.

Gray posited that there were at least three ways of conceiving God’s efficient cause ofnature which were open to theists who were convinced that Darwin had gotten his scienceright, but that the existence of a designing intelligence was still a proper inference. It wasthese conceptions which made both the adoption of evolutionary theory and natural the-ology possible.

His first attempt to formulate this view appeared in his first review of the Origin inMarch 1860. There Gray encouraged theistic naturalists to conceive of ‘‘the Divine Power’’as acting ‘‘coetaneous with Divine Thought,’’ and view God’s design of nature to havebeen ‘‘done from all time, or else as doing through all time’’ (Gray 1860a: 47). Heady asthis recommendation might have been, Gray knew these conceptions to be consistent withlong held Christian views of an eternally existent God, and philosophically compatiblewith evolution by natural selection. In the ‘‘ultimate analysis,’’ Gray supposed everyphilosophical theist would have to adopt one or the other conception (Gray 1860a: 47). Thefirst, with its deistic implications, might be ‘perverted’ to support Atheism, and the secondmight just as easily be construed to support or imply pantheism (Gray 1860a: 49–50). Inspite of these possibilities, Gray believed the view of God ‘‘doing through all time’’ to be

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the ‘‘more philosophical as well as Christian view,’’ and to be more clearly consistent withevolutionary descent with modification (Gray 1860a: 47).

Gray added a third conception to this list in his October 1860 review of the Origin,where he wrote, ‘‘There are, perhaps, only three views of efficient cause which may claimto be both philosophical and theistic.’’ These are:

1). The view of its exertion at the beginning of time, endowing matter and created things withforces which do the work and produce the phenomena.

2). This same view, with the theory of insulated interpositions, or occasional direct action,engrafted upon it—the view that events and operations in general go on in virtue simply offorces communicated at the first, but that now and then, and only now and then, the Deity putshis hand directly to the work.

3). The theory of the immediate, orderly, and constant, however infinitely diversified, action of theintelligent efficient Cause. (Gray 1860e: 130)

Gray believed that most naturalists, including Darwin, who spoke of ‘designed laws’and ‘laws impressed on matter,’ might prefer the first option where God endowed matterand created things by forces which produced the phenomena of nature on their own. Indeedhe ‘‘judged it probable’’ that Darwin regarded ‘‘the whole system of Nature as one whichhad received at its first formation the impress of the will of its Author, for seeing [sic] thevaried yet necessary laws of its action throughout the whole of its existence, ordainingwhen and how each particular of the stupendous plan should be realized in effect’’ (Gray1860a: 46). As for himself, he adopted the third view (an elaboration on his earlier remark‘‘doing through all time,’’), believing it ‘‘preeminently the Christian view.’’ Gray alsoargued that adopting this option furthered his case that the Darwinian system could beviewed as analogous to Christian theology as it left ‘‘the same difficulties and the samemysteries in Nature as in Providence, and no other’’ (Gray 1869e: 128, 116). Darwin’stheory ‘‘on this view’’ Gray explained, was merely the ‘‘human conception of continuedand orderly Divine action’’ (Gray 1860a: 47).

Gray believed his third option also possessed a distinct advantage in relieving Darwin’stheory from the objection that the presence of God could not be detected in a gradualisticevolutionary process. A creator who ‘‘superintended’’ nature through ‘‘infinitely diversifiedaction’’ rather than by ‘‘insulated interpositions, or occasional direct action,’’ would not,indeed could not, be a detectable presence in the living world. As Gray later explained tothe prominent theologian and Darwin critic Charles Hodge (1797–1878):

When [Darwin] speaks of this or that particular or phase in the course of events or the procession oforganic forms as not intended, he seems to mean not specially and disjunctively intended and notbrought about by intervention. Purpose in the whole, as we suppose, is not denied but implied. Andwhen one considers how, under whatever view of the case, the designed and the contingent lieinextricably commingled in this world of ours, past man’s disentanglement, and into what meta-physical dilemmas the attempt at unraveling them leads, we cannot greatly blame the naturalist forrelegating such problems to the philosopher and the theologian (Gray 1874a, b, c: 225).5

However, if detecting design in an evolving natural world lay ‘‘past man’s disentan-glement,’’ how would the argument for design remain viable for natural theologians? Ifnatural theologians rejected the idea that God intermittently produced organisms in naturethat were perfectly fitted to their environments and embraced a Darwinian view where

5 Readers might note the distinct dissimilarity between Gray’s argument for design through evolution andthe modern argument for ‘‘Intelligent Design’’ as formulated by the philosopher and mathematician WilliamDembski. Modern ID theory argues that instances of design are detectable in nature whereas Gray is hereexplicitly arguing that such an inference is ‘‘past man’s disentanglement.’’

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species adapted gradually to their environments as a result of selective pressures weedingout randomly occurring variations, could they really continue to infer design from theliving world? Gray believed that philosophical naturalists could not only continue to inferdesign in nature, but that they absolutely should. As he wrote to his friend, the Americantheologian and amateur geologist, George Frederick Wright, ‘‘[t]he important thing to do’’was to ‘‘develop a right evolutionary teleology,’’ which presented the argument for designin such a way as to convince ‘‘Christian men, that they may be satisfied with—andperchance may learn to admire—Divine works effected step by step—if need be—in asystem of nature’’—and the anti-theistic people, to show that without the implication of asuperintending wisdom nothing is made out, and nothing credible’’ (Wright Papers: Grayto Wright August 14, 1875).

Many naturalists did follow Gray in attempting to develop a ‘‘right evolutionaryteleology.’’ Among these were the elder statesman of natural history Charles Lyell, andthe ‘‘celebrated author and divine’’ Charles Kingsley. Lyell had long agonized over theneed to retain a theological perspective on nature and was reluctant to embrace Darwin’stheory out of fear that his ideas in part contradicted Christian theology (Bartholomew1973: 261; Ruse 2003: 147). As the historian of geology Martin Rudwick has established,Lyell’s universe was ‘‘a universe fully under the dominion of providential natural laws’’and one which exhibited ‘‘perfect and wise design’’ (Rudwick 1970: 33). Upon readingGray’s arguments for design and the consistency of natural selection and natural theol-ogy, Lyell encountered an approach wherein Darwin’s view of nature could be interpretedas a ‘‘preconcerted arrangement,’’ and ‘‘manifested design’’ (Lyell 1863: 506; quotingfrom Gray 1860e: 125). Reading Gray thus enabled Lyell to more fully accept Darwin’stheory as consistent with a designed universe and the tradition of natural theology. Thismuch is clear from the closing pages of Lyell’s first pro-evolution work GeologicalEvidences of the Antiquity of Man (1863) where he commended Gray for his ‘‘excellentessay’’ which,

pointed out that there is no tendency in the doctrine of Variation and Natural Selection to weaken thefoundations of Natural Theology; for, consistently with the derivative hypothesis of species, we mayhold any of the popular views respecting the manner in which the changes of the natural world arebrought about. We may imagine ‘that events and operations in general go on in virtue simply offorces communicated at first, and without any subsequent interference, or we may hold that now andthen, and only now and then, there is a direct interposition of the Deity; or, lastly, we may supposethat all the changes are carried on by the immediate orderly and constant, however infinitelydiversified, action of the intelligent, efficient Cause (Lyell 1863: 505).

These ‘‘popular views’’ are clearly a reproduction of Gray’s three theistic conceptions ofthe efficient cause, and much of the final pages of the Antiquity of Man are clearly cribbedfrom Gray’s natural theological work. Following Gray, Lyell adopted his third conceptionand interpreted ‘‘Design in the natural world’’ as ‘‘coextensive with Providence’’ (Gray1860e: 144).

Another early supporter of Darwin’s theory who followed Gray’s natural theologicalwritings was Charles Kingsley; the amateur naturalist, theologian, and successful authorand popularizer of science. Like Gray, Kingsley’s conversion to Darwinism enhanced hisnatural theological view of the world rather than destroyed it. As he was busy working onhis own natural theological interpretation of evolution, Kingsley wrote his friend, the Rev.F.D. Maurice, declaring that ‘‘by far the best forward step in Natural Theology has beenmade by an American, Dr. Asa Gray, who has said better than I can all that I want to say.’’Following Gray, Kingsley believed that Darwin’s theory left only two options open fornatural scientists in a post-Darwinian world. They could either embrace the ‘‘absolute

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empire of accident,’’ or believe in ‘‘a living, immanent, ever-working God.’’ (Kingsley1893: 171). The latter option is clearly a reflection of Gray’s third way.

Writing to Henry Walter Bates, Kingsley explained that he agreed ‘‘with Dr. Asa Gray,in his admirable pamphlet on Darwin, that the tendency of physical science is ‘not towardsthe omnipotence of Matter, but to the omnipotence of Spirit’’’ (Kingsley 1893: 174). As heremarked further ‘‘what looks most like an immensely long chapter of accidents, is really,if true, a chapter of special Providences’’ (Kingsley picked up the phrase ‘‘chapter ofaccidents’’ from Gray 1860e: 127). Like Gray, Kinglsey clearly displayed a Providentialistinterpretation of the evolutionary process and turned to his fellow theists and askedwhether it was possible to doubt that ‘‘the actual results of the development in the inorganicworlds are not merely compatible with design, but are in the truest sense designed results?’’(Kingsley 1893: 174). When it came time to present his own theological interpretation ofDarwin’s theory, Kingsley undoubtedly constructed much of his ‘‘Natural Theology of theFuture’’ from the ideas he originally encountered in Gray (See Kingsley 1880).

6 Conclusion

While Darwin, an agnostic, found himself in a ‘‘thick mud’’ when he considered Gray’stheistic interpretation of evolution and thought it ‘‘wisest for scientific men to quite ignorethe whole subject of religion,’’ he never precluded or discouraged naturalists such as Lyell,Kingsley, and Gray from embracing such an option (Brooke 1991: 398; see also Burkhardt9:226).6 As he wrote to another such naturalist in 1879, his own personal views on thequestion of God were of no consequence to anyone except himself, but he nonethelessagreed that it was ‘‘absurd to doubt that a man may be an ardent Theist & an evolutionist.’’He pointed to Asa Gray as a ‘‘case in point’’ (CCD Online: Letter 12041). As Darwin hadwritten in the Origin, he saw no reason why his views ought to disturb anyone’s religiousbeliefs.

Darwin was in agreement with Gray, who explained to an audience of Yale Seminariansin 1880, that ‘‘the idea of the evolution of one species from another and all from an initialform of life,’’ simply did not ‘‘add any new perplexity to theism’’ (Gray 1880: 66).Darwin’s own perplexities with theism and his intellectual struggles with the origin of eviland the relationship between free-will and predestination were philosophical and theo-logical in nature. They had not proceeded from his theory of evolution by natural selectionand he had not given them any further elaboration. Darwin and Gray both understood thatthe foundation for theistic interpretations of nature could not be scientific, but wasphilosophical, and rooted in an individuals conception of the relationship between scienceand religion and their theological beliefs concerning the work of Divine Providence in thenatural world. This is why Gray argued that Christian men of science who adopted Dar-win’s description of the system of nature would be accepting only the ‘‘same mysteries innature as in providence,—and no other.’’

Although Gray is repeatedly described by historians of Darwinism as one who blurredthe boundary between the natural and the supernatural, this was certainly not his intention

6 Indeed, Darwin himself promoted Gray’s theistic gloss of the Origin in 1861 when he had Gray’s three-part essay originally published in the Atlantic Monthly [cited here as Gray (1860b, c, e)] republished as apamphlet for distribution in England. Darwin himself selected the title for this pamphlet: ‘‘Natural Selectionnot inconsistent with Natural Theology: A Free examination of Darwin’s Treatise on the Origin of Species,and of its American Reviewers’’ (Burkhardt 8: 438; 443).

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(Ruse 2003: 149; Hunter 2009). As J.D. Hooker recalled to T.H. Huxley in the year ofGray’s death, Gray strove to understand and present Darwin’s theory ‘‘clearly,’’ while he‘‘sought to harmonise it with his prepossessions, without disturbing its physical propertiesin any way’’ (Huxley 1900: 193). Gray did not attempt to harmonize natural selection andnatural theology by augmenting the Darwinian mechanism of evolution with any empiri-cally detectable role for God to play in the process. This would have been an unwarrantedcommingling of the spheres of science and religion. In Gray’s opinion, the proper rela-tionship between science and theology required that each of these disciplines possess itsown distinctly separate, though equally important, sphere of intellectual inquiry. Thesphere of natural science dealt ‘‘only with secondary causes,’’ and the ‘‘scientific terms of atheory,’’ while the sphere of religion dealt with the philosophical interpretation andexplanation of the primary cause behind the existence and activity of these secondarycauses (Gray 1860e: 119). Accordingly, the scientific description of nature provided byDarwin was no less theologically acceptable than a theory of dynamics, and Grayrepeatedly declared that evolution was equally compatible with theistic, atheistic, or evenpantheistic conceptions of the world (Gray 1860e: 131). The supposed clash betweenscience and religion occurred only when inquiries into the causes in nature were carried upto the question of their primary or final cause; a question which Gray argued belonged tophilosophy (Gray 1860e: 119). In Gray’s post-Darwinian natural theology, science andreligion were neutral towards one another and did not intermingle as they had in so manyformer natural theological conceptions.

While many post-Darwin naturalists interpreted evolution as ‘‘undirected’’ and therefore‘‘undesigned,’’ Gray presented another option, arguing that God’s Providential guidance ofthe evolutionary process remained theologically inferable in the same way that Hisinteraction with human history only became evident after the end results of his providentialguidance were assessed through the eyes of faith looking backwards. God’s sovereigntyover human history and the natural world had long been described by Christian theists likeGray as hidden, or mysterious, and this is how Gray viewed God’s design of nature throughthe Darwinian process. As he wrote, ‘‘the designed and the contingent lie inextricablycommingled in this world of ours, past man’s disentanglement.’’ The ‘‘metaphysicaldilemmas’’ which plagued those who attempted to unravel the designed and the contingentin nature fully justified the separation of the scientific pursuit from the theological, andwarranted the naturalist’s resolution to relegate such problems to the philosopher and thetheologian. As one such philosophical naturalist, Gray attempted to devise a way fortheistic naturalists to accept Darwin’s theory without modification, as they continued toembrace their previously held theological beliefs.

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Darwin’s Other Bulldog: Charles Kingsleyand the Popularisation of Evolution in Victorian England

Piers J. Hale

Published online: 20 November 2011! Springer Science+Business Media B.V. 2011

Abstract The nineteenth-century Anglican Priest Charles Kingsley (1819–1875) was asignificant populariser of Darwin’s theory of evolution by natural selection. Kingsley wassuccessful in this regard because he developed such diverse connections throughout hiscareer. In the 1840s he associated with Chartists and radical journalists; in the 1850s and1860s he moved freely in scientific circles and was elected Fellow of the Linnean Societyof London in 1856 and Fellow of the Geological Society of London in 1863. In 1859 hewas appointed Chaplain in Ordinary to the Queen. In 1860 the Prince Consort was willingand able to secure Kingsley appointment as the Regius Professor of Modern History atCambridge University and he subsequently became tutor to the Prince of Wales. Thereafterhe was frequently invited into high Victorian Society. A friend of ‘Darwin’s Bulldog’Thomas Huxley, of the eminent geologist Charles Lyell and a correspondent of Darwin, atevery turn he sought to promote Darwin’s ideas as theologically orthodox, a life-longcampaign in which he was eminently successful.

On November 24th 1859 the London publishing house of John Murray published CharlesDarwin’s Origin of Species and, although Darwin had been careful to keep his speculationson the origins of man to a minimum, suggesting only that ‘‘Light will be thrown on theorigin of man and his history’’, the implications were clear to all (Darwin 1859: 488).

The young and ambitious comparative anatomist Thomas Huxley was one of ninetymen to whom Darwin had asked Murray to send an advance copy of his work, and Huxleyhad responded enthusiastically on the eve of publication. Huxley not only thought theOrigin significant for natural history, but also recognised that it would be read as havingprofound and controversial implications for the orthodoxy of High Church Tory Angli-canism. ‘‘I am prepared to go to the Stake if requisite’’, he told Darwin, ‘‘I am sharpeningup my claws and beak in readiness’’ (Burkhardt et al. 1991: 390–391).

P. J. Hale (&)Department of the History of Science, University of Oklahoma, PHSC,601 Elm Avenue, Rm. 610, Norman, OK 73019, USAe-mail: phale@ou.edu

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The Anglican theologian, naturalist and author, Charles Kingsley, also received anadvance copy of Origin, and he too was quick to respond.1 Kingsley told Darwin that from hislong familiarity with the breeding of domestic animals he was quite prepared to embrace thetransmutationist thesis at the heart of the book. Further, he added, he found it ‘‘just as noble aconception of Deity, to believe that He created primal forms capable of self development… asto believe that He required a fresh act of intervention’’. Indeed, he added, ‘‘I question whetherthe former be not the loftier thought’’ (Burkhardt et al. 1991: 379–380).

If Huxley wanted a fight, the 1860 meeting of the British Association for theAdvancement of Science, which met in Oxford that year, gave him ample opportunity. Ashe had foreseen, the controversy aroused by the implied link between humans and apes wasbrought to a head at the meeting—it has subsequently become one of the most notoriousevents in the history of science, and certainly in the history of the relationship betweenscience and religion (Hesketh 2009). The occasion was much anticipated for it had beenwell-circulated that the Bishop of Oxford, Samuel Wilberforce, a man renowned forcompelling oratory, and whom Darwin rated ‘‘one of the most eloquent men in England,’’was set to ‘‘smash Darwin’’ and his theory (Burkhardt et al. 1993: 274; Huxley, L. 1913: I,260). Huxley had already clashed with England’s most renowned comparative anatomist,Richard Owen, on the Thursday of the week long meetings; the two had disagreedvehemently over the points of similarity and difference between the brains of humans andthe higher primates. Both men had deemed the debate to be of great moral as well asmorphological significance and the exchange caused a ripple of excitement among those inattendance.

As Huxley’s son Leonard later reported in The Life and Letters of Thomas Huxley(1913):

On the Friday there was peace; but on the Saturday came a fiercer battle over the ‘‘Origin,’’ whichloomed all the larger in the public eye, because it was not merely the contradiction of one anatomistby another, but the open clash between Science and the Church… it was not to hear him [Dr. Draper,who opened with a discourse on the Origin], but the eloquence of the Bishop, that the members of theAssociation crowded in such numbers into the Lecture Room of the Museum, that this, the appointedmeeting-place of the section, had to be abandoned for the long west room… the room was crowded tosuffocation long before the protagonists appeared on the scene, 700 persons or more managing to findplaces. The very windows by which the room was lighted down the length of the west side werepacked with ladies, whose white handkerchiefs, waving and fluttering in the air at the end of theBishop’s speech, were an unforgettable factor in the acclamation of the crowd… (Huxley, L. 1913: I,262–263).

Of course, and famously, toward the end of the Bishop’s oration, referring to Huxley,and with full knowledge that he was in the crowd, Wilberforce demanded: ‘‘Is it throughhis grandfather or his grandmother that he claimed descent from a monkey?’’ Huxley, as hearose, apparently breathed to the physiologist and surgeon Sir Benjamin Brodie, who wasseated alongside him, ‘‘The Lord hath delivered him into mine hands,’’ and raising thetenor of his voice, replied for all to hear, ‘‘If… the question is put to me would I rather havea miserable ape for a grandfather or a man highly endowed by nature and possessed ofgreat means and influence and yet who employs these faculties and that influence for themere purpose of introducing ridicule into a grave scientific discussion—I unhesitatinglyaffirm my preference for the ape.’’2 ‘‘Whereupon,’’ Huxley later related to his friend,

1 For the full list of recipients with brief biographical sketch of each see (Burkhardt et al. 1993: AppendixIII:554–570).2 Thomas Huxley to Frederick Dyster, September 9, 1860, Huxley Papers, Imperial College, London,[hereafter ‘‘HP’’] 15.117.

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Frederick Dyster, ‘‘there was unextinguishable laughter among the people, and they lis-tened to the rest of my argument with the greatest attention. Lubbock and Hooker spokeafter me with great force and among us we shut up the bishop and his laity.’’3

Thus, according to the various accumulated accounts brought together by Huxley’s son,at least, with this damning repost Huxley won not only the day, but also a major victory indefense of rational thought from the incursions of blinkered superstition. Hearing of theevents at Oxford, Darwin, who had retreated to Edward Lane’s water cure at SudbrookPark, Richmond, immediately wrote a letter congratulating Huxley on his successful andspirited defense of his theory (Burkhardt et al. 1993: 277 & 280; Browne 2002: 114–125).In light of this and his further efforts to advance the cause of Darwinism and a secularmode of investigation in questions of science, Huxley’s self–appointment as ‘‘Darwin’sBulldog’’ was certainly appropriate.

In the early and anxious days in which he awaited the response to his book Darwinappreciated Kingsley’s support too, and wrote as much to his friends, including Huxley, thegeologist Charles Lyell, and the politician, naturalist and anthropologist John Lubbock.Each had been privy to Darwin’s developing ideas and had been among his principalsupporters from the first. He also mentioned Kingsley’s letter to his second cousin WilliamDarwin Fox—Kingsley had written a ‘‘capital paragraph’’, a ‘‘grand letter’’ (Burkhardtet al. 1991: 404–405, 409–410, 432–433, 449–450).4 Darwin was sure to include Kings-ley’s opinion in the second edition of Origin, which rolled off the press but a few shortweeks after the first, on 7th January 1860 (Burkhardt et al. 1991: 410–411).5 Given suchfirm endorsement by ‘‘a celebrated author and divine’’, Darwin wrote, ‘‘I see no goodreason why the views given in this volume should shock the religious feelings of anyone’’(Darwin 1860: 481).

Huxley is well known as Darwin’s main promoter and publicist, Kingsley—although hisletter of endorsement is often quoted—is much less so. My title, ‘‘Darwin’s Other Bull-dog’’, invites comparison between these two men and their efforts to promote Darwin’sideas, and for good reason. Although the two had very different reactions to Origin, I wantto make the case that Kingsley was just as significant as was Huxley in marshalling thereception of Darwin’s work. Despite their differences, each recognised the other asworking to advance a common cause—even if there was some disagreement on occasionover exactly what that common cause was. Kingsley, an ardent theist, saw himself aspromoting Darwin’s revelation of the divine laws by which God governed the world,whereas Huxley would later coin the word ‘‘agnostic’’ to describe his own commitment toscientific naturalism. Nevertheless, both men worked tirelessly—and often in collabora-tion—to promote modern science as a way of understanding the world that would benefitthe working man and advance the national interest.

Significantly, they also saw science as a fundamental tool for the reform of the AnglicanChurch, Huxley sought to undermine its monopoly on political power so that merit mightrise where privilege held sway, Kingsley sought to save the church from the error and

3 Thomas Huxley to Frederick Dyster, September 9, 1860, HP 15.117.4 Darwin later also wrote to John Stevens Henslow confirming that Kingsley was the author (Burkhardtet al. 1993: 444–445).5 In a letter to Murray Darwin had clearly indicated his intention to add an insertion to the second additionthat would read ‘‘The only passages of the least importance added, are (p. ) on fossil birds,—on (p. ) nascentorgans in contradistinction with rudimentary organs, - and lastly (p. ) an extract on the theological bearing ofthe views advocated in this work.’’ This last, a reference to Kingsley’s views (Burkhardt et al. 1991:410–411).

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ridicule that he foresaw would follow from refusing the truth of the discoveries that sciencewas making on all sides.

In re-evaluating Kingsley, especially in the shadow of Darwin’s bulldog, it is significantthat historians have long questioned Leonard Huxley’s account of the Oxford meeting.Written so long after the event, Ian Hesketh is by no means alone in suggesting that itserved later rhetorical interests more than it was an accurate record of events.6 Certainly, itseems that it was by no means apparent to all who attended the meeting that the victory hadbeen Huxley’s quite as unambiguously as his son Leonard’s account would have usbelieve, but up for question too is the nature of the ground that was being fought upon, andthe extent to which the description of this being ‘‘a clash between science and the Church’’needs clarification.

Indeed, as Adrian Desmond, one of Huxley’s biographers, has pointed out, Huxley’smotivations are better understood in terms of class and power—his intention to attack thepolitics of privilege of the established Church, rather than to marshal science againstreligion per se (Desmond 1997: 618). Indeed, in correspondence Huxley told Kingsley hewas quite amenable to a reformed church, and later went on to argue the importance ofreligious instruction (L. Huxley 1913: II:26).

Some good work has already been done on Kingsley as a populariser, and historianshave noted that the support he gave Darwin was both outspoken and enduring.7 JamesMoore has given Kingsley some attention as one among a number of theists who lentDarwin their support, noting that Darwin was no doubt ‘‘pleased to have Kingsley’ssupport against the attacks of Jenkin and the Duke of Argyll’’ (Moore 1981: 306). Kingsleyhad written to Darwin regarding a critical article in the North British Review, whichalthough published anonymously, had been written by Henry Charles Fleeming Jenkin,Professor of Engineering at Edinburgh University. Fleeming Jenkin had challenged Dar-win’s theory of speciation on several fronts, but primarily on the ground that useful andnovel variations must be swamped as a result of interbreeding among the general popu-lation, causing a return to the mean rather than the divergence of character that was centralto Darwin’s theory (Fleeming Jenkin 1867; Darwin 1859: 111–126). Kingsley considered,but dismissed Fleeming Jenkin’s objections, noting of the article that ‘‘it is a pity the manwho wrote it had not studied a little zoology & botany, before writing about them’’(Burkhardt et al. 2005: 295).8

In the same letter Kingsley had also taken Darwin’s side against the criticisms raised byGeorge Douglas Campbell, the Duke of Argyll in his book The Reign of Law (1867).Argyll had argued that ‘‘Mr. Darwin’s theory offers no explanation’’ of the beauty andvariety of colour in the plumage and tail-feathers of the hummingbird; ‘‘Mere beauty and

6 Subsequent to this account of the 1860 debate not only have the details of the British Association meetingbeen called into question, but so too have the results. There also remains debate as to Huxley’s role, andsome question as to whether the Bishop was quite as convincingly routed as Leonard Huxley’s accountsuggests (Lucas 1979; Gilley and Loades 1981; Morrell and Thackray 1981; Burkhardt et al. 1993: 270;Hesketh 2009).

Also, the ‘‘warfare hypothesis’’ between science and religion, to which the above account has been pivotalhas now long been out of favour with historians (J.H. Brooke 1991; Moore 1981; Livingstone 1987; Bowler2007). Correspondingly, Huxley’s battles have been re-cast as strategic efforts to carve out a professionalidentity and a political niche for the ‘‘man of science’’ in mid-Victorian Britain (White 2003; Desmond1997; Lynch 2002; Browne 2002).7 For an extensive bibliography of works on and by Kingsley see the Boston College Libraries’ website:Charles Kingsley: The Twentieth Century Critical Heritage, available at https://www2.bc.edu/*rappleb/kingsley/kingsleyhome.html.8 For Darwin’s detailed reply to Kingsley see Burkhardt et al. (2005: 297–301).

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mere variety, for their own sake’’, he contended, were sure evidence of God’s creative hand(Burkhardt et al. 2005: 295; Argyll, (no date, [1867]: 142, 140)). While, Kingsley con-fessed that in his ‘‘old fashioned way’’, he was sympathetic to the idea that God createdthings that humans might find beautiful, he told Darwin bluntly that he thought thatalthough the Duke’s book was ‘‘very fair and manly’’, ‘‘what he says about the hum-mingbirds is his weakest part. He utterly overlooks sexual selection by the females, as onegreat branch of natural selection’’ and thus the fact that beauty existed ‘‘for the amusementof the females first’’ (Burkhardt et al. 2005: 295).9

More recently, and in more depth, Bernard Lightman has drawn attention to the fact thatalthough Kingsley first published his own natural history writing in the North BritishReview in the 1850s, he took quite a different position from Fleeming Jenkin and othermembers of the ‘‘North British group’’, who ‘‘bearing the impress of Scottish Presbyte-rianism… were prepared to enter into alliance with Cambridge Anglicans to undermine theauthority of Huxley and his allies’’ (Lightman 2007: 7–8). Where John Beatty and PiersHale have focused on Kingsley’s evolutionary fairy tale Water Babies (1862), in whichKingsley portrayed natural selection as quite in line with belief in a stern but caring God,Lightman has highlighted the ways in which Kingsley’s post-Origin popular sciencewritings reflected the development of his maturing thoughts on how natural theology mightfind accommodation with natural selection (Beatty and Hale 2008; Lightman 2007;Lightman 2010).

As Lightman points out, while in the immediate aftermath of the publication of Originin 1859, like the American botanist Asa Gray, Kingsley believed that Divine Providencewas evident throughout even a Darwinian natural world, upon reflection, and as is evidentacross Madam How and Lady Why (1869), Town Geology (1872) and Natural Theology ofthe Future (1871),—the last of which was reprinted as a preface to his WestminsterSermons and published in 1874, the year before his death,—Kingsley eventually concludedthat natural science and natural theology were two separate, although complementary,enterprises. The task of the former was ‘‘to find out the How of things’’, that of the latter,‘‘to find out the Why’’ (Kingsley 1874, quoted in Lightman 2007).10

Thus historians of science have significantly extended our understanding of Kingsley’sembrace of Darwinian evolution and of the development of his thoughts on the relationshipbetween natural science and natural theology as they matured, and of how he presentedthese ideas to the public. I have two reservations about this scholarship, however. First, asscholars have broadened their focus to look at the wide range of Darwinian populariserswho were influential in the last half of the nineteenth century, it has become the tendencyto look at Huxley, and at Kingsley in particular, as each being just one among manyengaged in the promotion of their own particular view of what Darwinism meant in moral,political and theological terms. Lightman in particular has done sterling work in recoveringthe publication history of the works of many of these popularisers, but, there is furtherwork that needs to be done on many of these figures in order to establish the real sig-nificance of this kind of evidence. As Jim Secord has demonstrated in Victorian Sensation

9 In fact Argyll had not overlooked sexual selection, as Kingsley suggests, he had rejected it as ‘‘beside thequestion’’. Argyll thought sexual selection inadequate to explain the extent of the difference between thecomparatively dull female and the wide variety among the ‘‘fantastically decorated’’ males. See Argyll([1867]: 137).10 There were significant differences between Gray and Kingsley. Most notably in that Kingsley clearlyembraced the contingency at the heart of Darwinian selection, where Gray, a Calvinist, believed thatevolutionary outcomes were preordained. This is the subject of ongoing research that I am engaged in withJohn Beatty. On Gray see the essay by T. Russell Hunter in this volume.

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(2000)—his study of the readership and reception of that other great Victorian evolutionarywork Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation (1844)—we need to take account of awhole social history of reading, of the reputation—in the broadest sense—that an authorheld among his or her various readerships. This brings me to my second critique of theways in which historians of science have treated Kingsley thus far. We have yet to ade-quately situate Kingsley in the contemporary networks of class and power in the way thatDesmond has done for Huxley. By looking at Kingsley in this way we can expose thesocial networks that were at work that enabled him to become such an effective populariseracross so many different audiences—working men, men of science, broad church and highchurch Anglicans, and even among the men and women who frequented the highestreaches of Victorian society. The various reputations that Kingsley had in these quitedifferent circles reflected not only the complexities of his own class identity in the contextof a period of rapid social, cultural and economic transformation, but the work he did andhad done at various points in his career.

The period from 1832 through to Kingsley’s death in 1875 was a tumult of social andpolitical unrest,—of the rise and fall of Chartism, of the formation of a new liberal intelli-gentsia, and the assault upon and eventual collapse of Anglican monopoly.11 Class identity,social status and cultural authority were all in flux in the wake of the 1832 Reform Act asmen and women formed new class allegiances and identities and contested the boundaries ofthe social-networks and hierarchies of an earlier age (Thompson 1963). Industrialists—selfmade men—rose on the back of finance capital, but unlike their French bourgeois coun-terparts, aspired to the lifestyle of the landed gentry. They bought country houses, andpurchased or married title—no guillotine was raised in this revolution (Thompson 1965).Moore, and more recently M.J.S. Hodge, have noted the significance of the fact that Darwinaspired to the lifestyle of the landed squirearchy, as had his father (Moore 1985; Hodge2009). As industry became king, the engineer and the man of science, as well as the man ofletters,—the author, the journalist, the publisher, the editor—also became familiar andinfluential figures in Victorian society. As Noel Annan has shown, men—and a fewwomen—who made their living by the pen forged a new intelligentsia (Annan 1955).12

In the process of this re-forging of the nation, natural science became a coveted andcontested resource—those who spoke for nature had the power to describe the naturalorder. To some of the old guard it was the natural theology of social stasis, to others itnaturalized social change—Paul Elliott has shown that the ideas of the French transmut-ationist Jean Baptiste Lamarck were not only appropriated to this end by London andEdinburgh radicals, but that this was the case among radicals throughout the provinces aswell (Elliott 2009; Desmond 1992). To Huxley, of course, the order of nature vindicatedthe politics of the emerging middle class—Darwin had written ‘‘a veritable Whitworth gunin the armoury of liberalism’’ (Huxley 1894: 23). The best suited organism ruled the dayfor there were no special privileges in nature.

As science and industry changed the face of the nation Huxley used Origin to assail theramparts of Anglican privilege; it was unclear whether this would also be the undoing ofnatural theology, or of the Established Church,—certainly Darwin had put the doctrine ofspecial creation under withering fire.

It was here that Kingsley was so important. Where Huxley uttered a call to arms,Kingsley offered a calmer reassurance—not only to the working men who had appreciated

11 Desmond and Moore (1994), Annan (1955), Collini (2006) and Desmond (1992).12 Notable women include Marian Evans (George Eliot); Mrs. Gaskill; and Harriet Martineau, amongstothers.

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his labours on their behalf in the 1840s and 1850s, but those liberal theologians who fearedwhere science might lead them. A competent naturalist and skilled geologist Kingsleycame to mix freely in gentlemanly scientific circles years before Origin was published. Asa result he was ideally positioned to reassure those who were less than eager to embrace theagnosticism that Huxley offered as the logical consequence of the scientific world-view.By the 1860s Kingsley also moved in the highest echelons of Victorian society. Wellconnected by birth and marriage, by this time he was also a social lion—a famous author,Regius Professor at Cambridge, tutor to the Prince of Wales and Chaplain to the Queen.Even here he was often called upon for his opinion on the orthodoxy of Darwin’s views.Further, as Canon of Chester, he organized a local natural history society, as he had atEversley, and led hundreds on excursions into the countryside. Finally, as Canon ofWestminster, in the year before he died, Kingsley republished ‘‘The Natural Theology ofthe Future’’, an essay in which he reaffirmed his belief that true religion need fear nothingfrom science, as the preface of his Westminster Sermons (1874).

As the 1862 meeting of the British Association for the Advancement of Science hadapproached, at which Huxley would once more engage the enemy, Kingsley had writtenpromising to show that ‘‘I [too] have teeth and claws, and [take] especial pleasure inworrying a parson’’, but did so, he said, ‘‘just because I am a good churchman.’’13

Throughout his own campaign to popularize Darwin’s work Kingsley’s battle was to seethe established Church reconciled with science, and he was quite as prepared as wasHuxley to employ whatever means might prove necessary.

1 The People’s Priest

Kingsley’s biographers are agreed that Kingsley was not the radical that many of hiscontemporaries perceived him to be; that he was a paternalist Tory rather than a socialrevolutionary. This is unsurprising given his class and family connections, but he wasperceived to be radical, nonetheless, and he was both genuine and adamant in his con-viction that the plight of the poor was intolerable and needed redress.

Kingsley’s early biography mirrored that of many a son of privilege. His father wasdescended from an old Hampshire family, his mother from a slave-worked sugar plantationowner in Barbados. Although his father had spent his inheritance and the end of slavery in1833 stemmed the flow of income from his mother’s side, Kingsley’s father secured areputable career in the Church (Vance 2009). Thus, growing up, the natural theology ofbeneficent design that had been the presumption of generations of English gentlemannaturalists was Kingsley’s intellectual framework.

As a youth Kingsley was fascinated with the natural world, and like many a boy of hisage and interests, he was proud of his beetle collection. He was also a keen fisherman, acrack shot, and a skilled huntsman, having ridden with his father from an early age.Kingsley’s father was otherwise much aloof from his children, but the two had a love ofnature in common; the Reverend Kingsley was keenly interested in the habits and habitatsof the animals he hunted, and he passed this on to his son. They also shared a fascinationwith the earth’s history, the young Kingsley breaking all decorum one evening with anoutburst at the fireside when he was supposed to be reciting Latin grammar, ‘‘I do declare,papa, there is pyrites in the coal’’ (Chitty 1975: 32).

13 Charles Kingsley to Thomas Huxley, 4th August (1862, HP, 19, 207, 19).

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This proved no temporary childish fascination and when Kingsley went up to Cam-bridge in 1838, while he continued to ride, hunt and fish, his one passion was the course ingeology taught by the Reverend Adam Sedgwick. It was Sedgwick who had some yearsbefore taken Darwin on a fortnight’s geologizing expedition to North Wales as hastyapprenticeship for the Beagle voyage, and Kingsley later vividly recalled his own love ofSedgwick’s geology classes, and his appreciation of ‘‘Old Sedge’’, his tutor. Sedgwick hadled students on geologizing excursions (– or ‘‘jolly-gizzing’’ as the stable-keepers referredto it,) on horseback across the Cambridgeshire countryside (Chitty 1975: 56)—WhereDarwin was the ‘‘man who walks with Henslow’’ during his own time at Cambridge,Kingsley earned a reputation as a ‘‘hard and fearless rider’’ (Ludlow 1893: 497), and thus itmight not be inappropriate to think of Kingsley as ‘‘the man who rode with Sedgwick’’,—even though Sedgwick would never bring himself to entertain the idea of evolution.Kingsley graduated in 1842 with a first class in classics and mathematics.

A graduate of Cambridge and recently married, Kingsley had witnessed the dreadfulplight of agricultural labourers at the outset of his career while staying with his brother inlaw, Lord Sydney Godolphin Osborne, who held the parish living at Durweston in Dorset(Chitty 1975; Seccombe and Clement 2004). Osborne had been deeply engaged in trying toimprove the lot of his parishioners in the face of the landholder’s wanton indifference totheir desperate poverty and the experience fired Kingsley with a combined sense of moraloutrage and obligation that was to become the hallmark of his life. ‘‘I will never believethat a man has a real love for the good and the beautiful except he attacks the evil and thedisgusting the moment he sees it’’, he wrote (quoted in Chitty 1975: 91). That the plight ofOsborne’s parishioners was not exceptional was brought home to him when he took up hisown living at Eversley, in Hampshire in 1844.

Characteristic of the qualities that would later be dubbed ‘muscular Chrisitianity’,where Osborne documented the conditions of the poor and wrote sermonizing letters to theTimes, Kingsley was moved to action. He set about providing basic education for hisparishioners, established several savings clubs, and provided what relief he could to thepoorest who flocked to his door (Chitty 1975: 96–97)—‘‘Do the work that’s nearest’’, helater wrote in one of his poems (Kingsley 1856).

Kingsley’s concern for the working poor brought him notoriety in 1848, when, asrevolutions swept Europe, he involved himself in the Chartist movement. Kingsley hadbeen writing for John Parker’s Fraser’s Magazine to supplement what was left of hismeagre income once he had tended to the most needy of his flock. Parker, who was a friendand fellow student of Kingsley’s from his Cambridge days, had published Kingsley’s firstbook, The Saint’s Tragedy, earlier in 1848, and was visiting the Kingsleys at Eversley asthe Chartists gathered in London. They discussed the growing sense of unrest in the capitaland Kingsley took the opportunity to return with Parker to see what could be done.

Throwing in his lot with the liberal theologian Frederick Maurice, who was thenchaplain at Lincoln’s Inn, Thomas Hughes, who was studying for the bar, and JohnLudlow, a young barrister, the four founded the Christian Socialist movement. Kingsley’soutspoken and enthusiastic response to the plight of the demonstrators where othersremained silent quickly saw him dubbed ‘‘the Chartist Parson’’.14 Proving his mettle, headopted the pseudonym ‘‘Parson Lot’’, and boldly stated in an open letter to the demon-strators that ‘‘My only quarrel with the Charter is, it does not go far enough in reform.’’ It isunsurprising that he was quickly branded a radical (Huxley E. 1973: 26).

14 British Library Add. 28510 f.315.

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Kingsley was willing to put his money where his mouth was. When his appeals toaddress the insanitary living conditions of the East End of London fell on deaf ears, forinstance, he went into the cholera-ridden districts with horse and cart placing casks of freshwater on street-corners. On another occasion, outraged at the injustice of the piece-worksystem in clothing manufacture he established a tailor’s cooperative in the West End,persuading Samuel Wilberforce, who was his diocesan, to buy his servants’ liveries there.15

Kingsley elaborated upon his views in the journal that he, Maurice, Hughes and Ludlowestablished called Politics for the People,—Parker willingly took on the publication—thetitle alone was enough for many to conclude that Kingsley was indeed a man ofimmoderate opinion (Chitty 1975: 111; Morton 1966: 137–143). Kingsley went on to writea series of articles, pamphlets and several novels on the plight of urban as well as agri-cultural workers. The Macmillan brothers’s publishing house joined Parker in seeing theminto print, gaining Kingsley a national reputation in the process.

Kingsley was to put Macmillans on the map as a successful publisher. His WestwardHo! (1855), which eventually sold over 100,000 copies, made him, for a time, their mostvaluable author (Morgan 1944; Chitty 1975).16 Like Parker, however, the Macmillanbrothers, Daniel and Alexander, were not initially concerned with Kingsley’s work for itscommercial potential. They too revered the liberal theologian Frederick Maurice, and sawtheir publishing house as a vehicle to advance the ideals of Christian Socialism rather thana business venture alone (Morgan 1944: 35). Rising standards of education drove up theliteracy rate exponentially throughout the nineteenth century, while new publishingpractices and falling book prices in the second half of the century also encouraged morepeople to read. As Secord attests, the emergence of a new reading public, with its fads andenthusiasms, its literary lions and society favourites became a significant phenomenon inVictorian society and politics—one that was to propel Kingsley into the limelight amongthe reading classes.17

15 Chitty (1975: 130–133), Maurice F. (1884: II, 78–80) and Pope-Hennessey (1949: 118).16 Macmillan’s publishing company was founded in 1843 by the two brothers Daniel and AlexanderMacmillan. Devout Christians, they published the theological work of Frederick Maurice, even though theydid so at a financial loss. Through Maurice they met Kingsley and Thomas Hughes, publishing WestwardHo! And Glaucus in 1855 and Hughes’s Tom Brown’s School Days in 1857 (Morgan 1944: 35; Andersonand Rose 1991: 178–195). Westward Ho! was Kingsley’s first novel for Macmillans and Macmillans firstnovel. It appeared as a ‘three-decker’, that is, in three separately bound volumes, as was the standard formatof the day, made popular by the success of Scott’s Waverley novels. The standard price for a three-deckerwas a guinea and a half, or, 31 shillings and sixpence, a price for this format that persisted even into the late1880s, when the ‘three decker’ fell to the single volume novel (Griest 1970; Feather 2006: 123–124). Thiswas the price at which Westward Ho! first appeared in March of 1855. The edition ran to 1,250 copies, forwhich Kingsley was paid £300.00 followed quickly in May by £250 for a second edition of 750 copies.Somewhat against the grain of the publishing trade, which, largely capitulated to the preference of EdwardMudie’s circulating library for the three volume work, in 1857 Macmillan produced a single volume thirdedition with a print run of 6000 copies, for which Kingsley received a further £300. After 1873, author andpublisher came to a new arrangement of a 10 percent royalty fee on further sales. Such was Macmillans’confidence in Kingsley’s ability to sell, that they assured Mrs. Kingsley that they would publish Two YearsAgo in sufficient numbers to guarantee him £1000 on publication (Morgan 1944: 47). Such was the successof Westward Ho! that a substantial hotel was built on the North Devon coast of the same name, hoping tocater to increasingly popular seaside tourism, which Kingsley had also had a role in promoting. The townwhich grew up around the hotel took the same name.17 Between 1814 and 1850 literacy rates expanded across the middle and upper classes. Upper classreadership increased among the upper class from 75 to 90% during this time and from 25 to 75% among themiddle class. The middle class grew rapidly as well throughout the century, which makes the figures formiddle class literacy even more significant. What figures there are for working class literacy suggest aliteracy rate of approximately 20%, although figures are difficult to evaluate, since there was no assessment

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This raises interesting questions not only about the cross-class nature of Kingsley’s appeal,but about social status and issues of class and power in general in the middle third of thenineteenth century. This period witnessed the birth of what Annan has called an ‘‘intellectualaristocracy’’, and Stephan Collin, more recently, a ‘‘liberal intelligentsia’’ (Annan 1955:247–248; Collini 2006). The expansion of industry and commerce required new skills and anew class of workers, clerks, accountants, and journalists, as well as teachers and professors,those who earned their bread ‘‘by the dirty pen’’, to use Kingsley’s words (Kingsley 1856).Drawn primarily, but not exclusively, from across the lower middle class, often from familieswith precarious finances, it included radicals, dissenters, and liberal Anglicans as well asardent Comteans like G.H. Lewes, Marian Evans and Harriet Martineau. Annan has illus-trated the extent of this phenomena and the networks of intermarriage that cemented family,finance and new class allegiances across the country; earnest and aspiring intellectuals, they‘‘set the moral and educational and professional standards of what it meant to be a gentleman’’(Annan 1955).18 Despite their diverse intellectual or religious starting points, they wereunited in their critique of aristocratic privilege and corruption. Kingsley’s mish-mash ofaristocratic Tory paternalism, Christian socialism and bourgeois work ethic fit in wellenough—so too did his passion for natural history as a didactic enterprise.

2 In the Company of Radicals and Socialists

Theologically speaking, prior to 1859 Kingsley was a conventional enough natural theo-logian of the school of Joseph Butler and William Paley. Like many of his cut and cloth hehad had youthful doubts, but reaffirmed his faith through reading Maurice before he wasordained. When it came to the natural world, like the Cambridge theologian-naturalistswho taught him, Kingsley saw evidence of God’s beneficence all around him.

As I have suggested, though, by the 1840s natural science could mean much more thanthis. To Kingsley natural history was the perfect field in which the aspiring Christian mightconfirm and develop his faith. The study of God’s creation called for a man of action andadventure who had an enquiring mind and was prepared to endure discomfort, strenuousexercise and inclement weather—all in the quest to uncover the laws by which God hadordered the universe. In true Baconian fashion, Kingsley thought that the naturalist wouldthen be in a position to apply what he had learned in order to improve the lot of mankind(Kingsley 1860). Kingsley’s construction of the man of science as the ‘muscular Christian’was not incompatible with the hunting and riding set, of course, but by the 1850s itarguably described the likes of Hughes, Maurice, and even Huxley—who had made his

Footnote 17 continuedof working class education until the last decades of the nineteenth century. After 1850 the expansion oflending libraries, the railway network, and later in the century, of cheaper production methods, combinedwith a conscious attempt on the part of publishers to cater to new reading markets drove the cost of booksdown (Altick 1957: 294–317).18 What it meant to be a gentleman was contested throughout this period. Originally indicative of land-ownership, title and inherited wealth, the new class of successful industrialists, of whom the Wedgwoodswere a classic example, were new money. As E.P. Thompson has long since pointed out, in many ways theysought to mimic the lifestyle of the aristocracy, buying extensive estates, and buying or marrying into title.As Annan suggests, this novel lower middle class of intellectuals and pen-pushers asserted a new definitionof what it meant to be a gentleman based on education, honesty and personal integrity—the latter twocriteria, of course, were common to all (Thompson 1965). In light of Thompson’s work it is relevant thatKingsley’s wife’s father, Pascoe Grenfell who was an industrialist and MP, married the daughter of the firstViscount Doneraile as his second wife (Vance 2009).

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first forays into natural history while enduring the hardships of service in Her Majesty’sNavy—as well, if not better, than it did the likes of Sedgwick, William Whewell, orSamuel Wilberforce.19

Quite different interpretations of the lessons that might be learned from the study ofnatural history and natural science were evident in the heart of the capital, in the discus-sions and debates that fired the hopes and aspirations of the journalists, radicals, andreformers with whom Kingsley now mixed on a regular basis.

Historians have noted the importance of the salon that grew up around John Chapman’sWestminster Review, located on the Strand, for discussion and development of radical ideasin biology as well as politics (Desmond 1997: 196–197; Collini 2006: 18).20 Chapman hadtaken on the paper from John Stuart Mill and, with the aid of Harriet Martineau, revitalizedits fortunes with a fiery group of young contributing writers (Martineau 2007). Chapmanheld evening soirees where G.H. Lewes, Marian Evans, and the young Thomas Huxleymixed with other young and talented intellects—the physiologist William BenjaminCarpenter and the atheist cooperator George Holyoake among them (Baker 2004). Furtherdown the Strand were the offices of the free trade paper the Economist where the youngradical journalist Herbert Spencer was writing his Social Statics (1851) around his lightduties as sub-editor (Spencer 1904a: Vol. I: 347).

On the same street John Parker hosted four o’clock afternoon teas. His father had builtthe publishing house as a bastion of liberal Christianity, but, enamoured by Maurice, after1848 Parker steered it towards Christian socialism (Dean 2004). Many of the same peoplewho frequented Chapman’s offices also appear on Parker’s publishing list, and presumablypartook of his afternoon teas as well. The network of writers and publishers was a tightone, and John Murray’s house—at 50 Albermarle Street where he hosted social gatheringsof all comers—was also within easy walking distance.21 Such was the importance of thisclose-knit community that John Churchill’s medical publishing house also relocated to thearea in 1854, at 11 New Burlington Street, again only a short walk away (Bartrip 2004).

Thus Kingsley might well have been prepared to appreciate the evolutionary signifi-cance of the artificial selection of animal breeders through his long familiarity with theimportant variations among dogs and horses, as he had written to Darwin in 1859, but as afrequent visitor to the capital to see Parker, Maurice and Hughes, and to promote ChristianSocialism, he was certainly not ignorant of the debates about science, politics and trans-mutation that were going on all around him. Origin was certainly far from Kingsley’s firstexposure to these ideas. Spencer’s ‘‘Developmental Hypothesis’’ appeared in the radicalLeader and his ‘‘Theory of Population deduced from the general law of animal fertility’’ in

19 Sedgwick, Wilberforce and Whewell all rode. Wilberforce was a particularly keen huntsman, andWhewell an accomplished athlete. On Huxley as naval surgeon see (Desmond 1997); Huxley and Kingsleydid not meet in person until 1855 (L. Huxley 1913: I:177; Klaver 2006: 477–478). In the wake of Kingsley’stenure as Regius Professor of History at Cambridge it is evident that ‘muscular Christianity’ had a stronghold over many of the Colleges at the University, even as religious tests were dropped after 1871. Accordingto C.N.L. Brooke (1993: 30–39) this was especially evident in the rowing colleges, not only MagdaleneCollege, but Jesus College. See also C.N.L. Brooke (1988).20 Herbert Spencer gives an account of Chapman’s soirees and several of the attendees he met there(Spencer 1904a: I:347–348).21 John Murray was a traditionally conservative publishing house, and he was responsible too for theQuarterly Review which retained its conservative politics even as Murray published Samuel Smiles’s SelfHelp (1859), incidentally, on the same day as Darwin’s Origin. Murray was a staunch defender of religiousmorals, and refused Kingsley’s Saint’s Tragedy as well as Martineau’s Eastern Life on this score. However,like the other publishers considered here, he hosted large social gatherings, both at his offices on AlbermarleStreet and at his home in Wimbledon (Zachs et al. 2004).

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the Westminster in 1852 (Spencer 1852). In this essay and in Social Statics, which hadappeared the year before, Spencer outlined his vision of the evolution of humanity towardsa brighter more socialist future on the back of self-reliance, hard work and the developmentof moral character—no wonder that Kingsley later acknowledged Spencer as his favouriteauthor. Like Huxley, though, he remained unmoved—in public at least—by the trans-mutationism of the anonymously authored Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation,which, published by Churchill, went through its tenth edition in 1853 (Spencer 1851, 1852;Secord 2000).22

The company that Kingsley kept in London reinforced the perception that he was apolitical radical, an association that was only strengthened in 1851 when he delivered asermon on ‘‘The Message of the Church to the Labouring Man’’ to cater to the crowds ofworking men who flocked to the capital to see the Great Exhibition. Not only had Kingsleyunequivocally embraced socialism, but his advocacy of ‘‘freedom, equality and brother-hood’’ as the basis of modern Christianity was understandably taken by many as havingrevolutionary overtones,—fearing repercussions the Bishop of London banned him fromthe City’s pulpits.23 The London Daily News judged Kingsley a tainted man, and he wasbranded ‘‘a reckless and dangerous writer’’ by the then Principal of King’s College Oxford,Richard William Jelf (Hughes 1898: 31–33; Colloms 1975: 136–139). Kingsley’s wife,Fanny thus had good reason to fear that her husband was doing irreparable damage to hischances of preferment, and later recalled, ‘‘at this time and for some years to come, theclergy of all parties in the Church stood aloof from him as a suspected person’’ (Chitty1975: 111; Kingsley F. 1901: II, 150).

The reactions of Jelf and the Daily News speak volumes about the state of anxiety thatprevailed in London. Given the rapidity with which revolution had spread across Europe,as the Chartists had marched on London the Duke of Wellington had drawn troops fromacross the country to set up barricades across the Thames bridges, and nearly a quarter of amillion special constables had been enlisted and the Queen had left the capital. ‘‘France isablaze in every quarter’’, Prince Albert wrote in the February of 1848, ‘‘European war is atour doors’’ (Weintraub 1997: 192).

In fact though, Kingsley’s message to the working man was one of appeasement and farfrom revolutionary. Kingsley, like Maurice, Hughes and Ludlow, certainly recognized theneed for reform, but it was also clear in his mind that the average working man was in needof moral reform and an education in the values of liberal self-help before political reformcould end in anything but disaster.24 Kingsley’s emphasis upon industry, honesty, clean-liness and Godliness reflected his embrace of Thomas Carlyle’s noble ‘‘Gospel of Work’’and Maurice’s broad church theology which together quickly became synonymous with

22 Lewes also discussed evolution explicitly in the pages of the Westminster drawing analogies between thebreeding of dogs, poultry, and horses (Lewes 1856a, b, c, d). As Secord points out, the tenth edition ofVestiges was ghost edited by Carpenter, who also became one of Kingsley’s close friends. Harris (2010)notes that Kingsley and Spencer met in this period. It is notable that Kingsley included an explicitlyevolutionary dream sequence in Alton Locke which owes a lot to the contemporary evolutionary take onembryological recapitulation which had been popularized by Vestiges, it was not until after the publicationof Origin that Kingsley was prepared to publically declare himself for evolution.23 Given the wording of Kingsley’s sermon, and the prevailing political climate, it is easy to see why thiswas the common interpretation of his words. Notably, ‘‘Freedom, Equality, Brotherhood’’ is the title of thelast chapter of Alton Locke.24 Smiles’s Self Help was essentially a liberal rather than a radical tract, Smiles urging his readers that‘‘character is the anti-septic of society’’ (Matthew 2009).

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Kingsley’s ‘muscular’ Christian socialism.25 The pursuit of natural history was one avenuethrough which Kingsley urged his readers to develop independence and moral character,and he championed sanitary science as the means to an environment in which they mightflourish. Kingsley saw the Crystal Palace as a beacon of hope for what might be, and spokeof a brighter day to come through ‘‘freedom, science, industry’’ (Chitty 1975: 109). AsGeoffrey Cantor has recently pointed out, Kingsley saw in the Great Exhibition thepromise that science and industry might realise a true spirit of international brotherhood,and was moved to tears upon first entering the building (Cantor 2011: 7 & 102).

3 Taking a Stand on Science

Despite the fact that Kingsley self-deprecatingly described himself as a mere ‘sciolist’ inhis letter of thanks to Darwin, his knowledge of natural history was far from superficial.26

He had been elected Fellow of the Linnean Society on the strength of his work in 1856 andwould be elected Fellow of the Geological Society in 1863.27 Kingsley was committed tothe methods of Baconian inductive science not only for the material improvements sciencemight bring the English people, but as a means of discovering truth about the world inservice to his natural theology. As a result, Kingsley consciously aligned himself with menof science in defense of the church against what he saw as the ‘‘Odium Theologicum’’ ofdenying the revelations of science—even if these truths were evolutionary,—but he wasalso keen to remind men of science that they need not throw out the baby with thebathwater. ‘‘I am not going astray into materialism as yet’’ he reassured Maurice, hismentor in theology, ‘‘but I must be utterly confidential and trustworthy with these men if Iam to do any good, and undo the horrible mischief wh. Owen and [Samuel Wilberforce theBishop of] Oxford have done’’.28 Indeed, Kingsley not only made a success as a sciencepopulariser with his written work, but in doing so became deeply integrated into the socialnetworks of natural science. He developed a close friendship with Huxley, Lubbock, Lyelland others, and despite his social ostracism as a theologian, he found himself welcomedinto the geological community.

Kingsley’s fascination with natural history and geology had been life long, but his interesttook on new significance in the summer of 1854. It was then that Kingsley relocated hisfamily to the Devonshire coast in the hope that the sea air would alleviate the health problemsthat his wife suffered as a result of the damp conditions in the rectory at Eversley. Stillshunned as a radical by the local clergy he was not invited to preach in the vicinity and soturned to natural history. It was here that he began his researches into the natural history ofthe seashore, and befriended Phillip Henry Gosse, author of Naturalist’s Rambles on theDevonshire Coast (1853) and staunch member of the puritanical Plymouth Brethren.

Historians have usually highlighted the significance of Kingsley’s friendship with Gossein order to expose Gosse’s somewhat embarrassing work Omphalos, which he wrote someyears later in 1857, and it is worth returning to this episode here as it demonstratesKingsley’s insistence upon the truth to be found through scientific inquiry (Gould 1985:

25 Carlyle (1843), Baldwin (1934), Haley (1978) and Rosen (1994).26 In Kingsley’s Letters and Memories, edited by his wife, this is mis-transcribed ‘‘scientist’’.27 Several dates have been suggested by Kingsley’s biographers for his election to the Linnean Society ofLondon; however, Society records indicate that he was elected 6 December 1856. I am grateful to ClaireInman, Communications Manager for the Linnean Society of London for ascertaining this point.28 Charles Kingsley to Frederick Maurice 1863, BL Add Ms. 41297.

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99–113). In Omphalos, Gosse sought to reconcile the apparent incommensurability ofGenesis and geologic time by proposing that God had placed fossils in the rocks to giveonly the appearance of pre-existence, just as Adam would have been born with a similarly‘‘fabricated’’ navel (‘‘Omphalos’’ is Greek for navel). Bereft of favourable responses fromother quarters Gosse had turned to Kingsley to review his book, but Kingsley was morethan candid in his refusal—he could not, he said, ‘‘give up the painful and slow conclusionof five and 20 years’ study of geology, and believe that God has written on the rocks oneenormous and superfluous lie’’ (Gosse 1986: 105). ‘‘Shall I tell you the truth?’’, he asked,‘‘It is best. Your book is the first that ever made me doubt, and I fear it will make hundredsdo so. Your book tends to prove this—that if we accept the fact of absolute creation, Godbecomes a Deus quidam deceptor [a ‘‘God who is sometimes a deceiver’’]…I would not fora thousand pounds put your book into my children’s hands’’ (Krause 1980).

This is certainly significant, but Kingsley’s acquaintance with Gosse in 1854 wasimportant for other reasons too. Their friendship developed over the rest of the year andKingsley continued to send Gosse specimens and descriptions of his own dissections afterthe latter returned to London. What had begun as an occupation to pass the time andentertain his children took on new meaning as Kingsley persisted with his own microscopy,writing a short article on his observations for the North British Review which appeared inNovember 1854 (Klaver 2006: 352–356). It was well received and confirmed Kingsley’sreputation as a competent naturalist. The Macmillan brothers were suitably impressed withthe article and asked him to expand it into the book that became Glaucus in 1855. It was askillful descriptive work that reflected both his orthodox natural theology and muscularChristianity as he encouraged young people to take up the inductive study of naturalhistory as a means to immerse themselves in the wonders of God’s creation (Klaver 2006:352–353; Elder 1996: 127–128).

The book had a mixed reception. It was slammed in both the conservative Blackwood’sEdinburgh Magazine and Athenaeum, but received abundant praise in the pages of theWestminster. Blackwood’s, like the Daily News, had no love of Kingsley in any case, and wasevidently happy to print a negative review regardless of the actual merits of the book. In theJune of 1855 the same paper had berated what it saw as the deeply questionable sexual politicsof Kingsley’s novels. ‘‘Mr. Kingsley is, we know, a gentleman, but he is also a man of extremeand unsafe opinions’’, the anonymous author had stated—a comment on the insinuation ofcross-class infatuation evident in several of Kingsley’s novels. Indeed, the reviewer con-cluded that ‘‘The socialist sympathies of Mr. Kingsley have carried him so far that he has lostsight of all considerations of rank, breeding, and education’’.29

The review of Glaucus although also negative, was so for different reasons. It waswritten by the young radical George Henry Lewes who took issue with Kingsley’s mus-cular Christianity, his natural theology, and questioned his competence as a naturalist in theprocess (Klaver 2006: 356 & 369). Lewes’s over-riding motive, however, was evidentlythe competition that Kingsley mounted to his own work in the field. Lewes wrote a seriesof three essays on ‘‘Seaside Studies’’ for Blackwood’s that appeared in 1856 with a furtheressay and a new series of a further five essays in 1857. He also published a book of thesame name in 1858 which, as Klaver points out, included none-too-thinly veiled attacks onKingsley as well (Klaver 2006: 369).30

29 Blackwoods Magazine, 77, 476 (June 1855), pp. 625–643, on 628.30 (Lewes 1856b, c, d; 1857a, b, c, d, e, f; 1858). Klaver notes that this was in part because he felt there wasnothing original in Kingsley’s work, but primarily because he was envious of the sales of Glaucus, writing tohis publisher to this effect (Klaver 2006: 369).

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The favourable review that appeared in the Westminster was Huxley’s. In 1855 Huxleyhad only recently returned from his voyage aboard HMS Rattlesnake and was struggling tomake ends meet reviewing scientific literature for Chapman at pennies a line (Desmond1997: 185). Huxley’s own specialty was marine organisms and, unlike Lewes, he appre-ciated the clarity and accuracy of Kingsley’s work (Huxley 1855).

Their common interest was to lead to a mutual respect that later blossomed intofriendship following the death of Huxley’s son, Noel, in 1860, and laid the groundwork foran ongoing intellectual exchange about the relationship between science and religiousbelief, about the nitty-gritty detail of doing science, and—on a deeper level—about thephilosophy of science as well (Beatty and Hale 2008). Kingsley had not only appreciatedHuxley’s review of his own work, but later applauded the review of Origin that Huxleywrote for Macmillan’s Magazine in 1860.31 Kingsley took the implications of Origin forhis natural theology seriously, and appealed to Huxley’s superior scientific knowledge tohelp him through, writing to ask if Huxley would kindly send his own papers on theCoelenterata—the order that then included sea anemones and jellyfish.32 Huxley did so,and in consequence Kingsley started to rethink the science behind the anti-evolutionarystance he had taken in the early editions of Glaucus. As their friendship deepened Kingsleytested his revised and now evolutionary natural-theology on his friend in return (Huxley L.1913: I: 345–348).

The summer of 1854 was thus crucial for Kingsley’s later career as a science popu-lariser, but there is more. One aspect of that summer that historians have hitherto over-looked is the friendship that he made with the Devonshire geologist William Pengelly.

William Pengelly was well-regarded in the geological community. He had founded theTorquay Natural History Society in 1844 and went on to found the Devonshire Associationfor the Advancement of Science, Art, and Literature in 1861. His life’s work on Kent’sCavern did a lot to substantiate not only the vast age of the earth, but also the antiquity ofman, it was Pengelly too, who introduced Kingsley into the geological community—bothfamilial and literary connections played their part.

As Pengelly’s daughter and biographer, Hester Julian, recalled, ‘‘The friendshipbetween Charles Kingsley and William Pengelly commenced through the latter’sacquaintance with the members of the Bird family, who frequently visited Torquay’’ nearto where Pengelly had a house (Julian 1923: 1–13). Torquay was a popular coastal resortduring the mid-nineteenth century and like the Kingsleys, the Birds had also relocated toTorquay for the summer of 1854. Mrs. Bird (nee Grenfell) was Fanny Kingsley’s sister,and thus Pengelly was subsequently introduced to Kingsley whom he knew as the author ofHypatia (1853). Pengelly had reckoned the book ‘‘first rate,’’ and soon came to hold itsauthor in similarly high esteem (Julian 1923: 1). The two clearly enjoyed each other’scompany in explorations not only of local Devonshire seashore, but also of the localgeology (Julian 1923: 4). Julian recorded that her father ‘‘thenceforward enjoyed thefriendship of the novelist, having the gratification of taking him to see many geologicalpoints of interest at Torquay, and entertaining him at his residence ‘Lamorna’’’ (Julian1923: 1).

According to Annan ‘‘Family connexions are part of the poetry of history’’, and it iscertainly the case that family, business, and social connections were important both forsecuring science an influence in Victorian society and for gaining admission and influencewithin the various scientific circles (Annan 1955: 243). Here Kingsley’s connections

31 Charles Kingsley to Thomas Henry Huxley, 7 December 1859, HP, 19. 160.32 Charles Kingsley to Thomas Henry Huxley, 18 July 1862, HP, 19, 205.

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through marriage again placed him in fortuitous company. Not only was Pengelly’s goodfriend Mrs. Bird, Kingsley’s sister in law, but the historian J.A. Froude, another ofPengelly’s friends, was married to Charlotte Grenfell, Fanny Kingsley’s other sister.Pengelly was also intimate with the geologists Lyell and Bunbury, of course, both of whomwere also frequent visitors to the Grenfell household, at Royal Lodge, Maidenhead, as wasJohn Lubbock.

Kingsley first met Lubbock in 1855, and it was while both were visiting PascoeGrenfell’s estate that Kingsley had taken Lubbock on a trek to the gravel pit near TaplowStation (Hutchinson 1914: I:23 & 37). It was here in Kingsley’s company that Lubbockunearthed the first fossil musk-ox to be found in Britain—evidence of a glacial age, itsecured Lubbock’s election as Fellow of the Geological Society in 1855 (Hutchinson 1914:I: 38). It was through Bunbury too that Kingsley met Joseph Dalton Hooker. As Kingsleywrote to Gosse in May 1856, the publication of Glaucus saw him receive many ‘‘pleasantletters, & self-introductions, from scientific men’’—Kingsley was obviously now includedin their ranks (Klaver 2006: 475). Hooker was among those who nominated Kingsley forelection as Fellow of the Linnean Society of London in 1856, as was Thomas Bell, theSociety’s president, who had worked on marine organisms himself.33

It was through these connections and following his appointment as Regius Professor inHistory at Cambridge in 1860 that Kingsley and his wife became frequent visitors atBarton Hall, the Bunbury’s country residence in Suffolk,—another country house thatbecame a familiar meeting point for men of science of the day. Not only did Kingsleycement friendships with the Lyell’s here, but it was also at Barton Hall that Kingsley metwith Hooker, Huxley and other members of the geological and scientific community on aregular basis. It was here too that Kingsley had his first nervous meeting with Darwin, atwhich, he later confessed to Lubbock, ‘‘I trembled like a boy’’ even as Darwin encouragedhim to write about the evolutionary natural history they discussed.34

Kingsley took the opportunity of having these and other eminent scientists in his socialcircle to continue his campaign to weed out the ill-seeds that had been sown by Wilber-force and Owen, but also, however doubtful of his own ability to do so, he also clearly tookDarwin’s encouragement about making his own contribution to evolutionary natural his-tory seriously. On both of these accounts, Kingsley wrote to Maurice that he believedhimself to be making some progress:

I am very busy working out points of Natural Theology, by the strange light of Huxley, Darwin, andLyell. I think I shall come to something worth having before I have done… The state of the scientificmind is most curious; Darwin is conquering everywhere, and rushing in like a flood, by mere force oftruth and fact… They find that now they have got rid of an interfering God—a master-magician, as Icall it—they have to choose between the absolute empire of accident, and a living, immanent ever-working God. Grove’s truly great mind has seized the latter alternative already, on the side ofchemistry. Anstead, in his Rede Lecture is feeling for it in geology; and so is Lyell; and I, in my smallway in zoology, am urging it on Huxley, Rolleston and Bates, who has just discovered facts aboutcertain butterflies in the valley of the Amazon, which have filled me, and, I trust, others, with utterastonishment and awe. Verily, God is great, or there is no God at all (Kingsley F. 1901: III: 175).

33 Again I am grateful to Clare Inman for this information. Kingsley was elected to the Society on 6thDecember 1856 and his nomination bears the signatures of William Yarrell, Thomas Bell (President), JosephD. Hooker, Lovel Reeve, and Edward Rigby. See Linnean (2005), 21, No. 2.34 Richard D. Beards, ‘‘Introduction’’, Water Babies, London, Penguin (2008), p. xii. Horace G. Hutch-inson, Life of Sir John Lubbock, Lord Avebury, London: MacMillan & Co. 1914, pp. 90–98 For an accountof Kingsley’s first meeting with Darwin see Charles Kingsley to John Lubbock, May 27 1867 (Hutchinson1914: 91–92; Clark 1984: 137).

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This list, added to those whom Kingsley met with at Barton Hall, includes some of thetruly eminent men of nineteenth-century science, and yet Kingsley was clearly not in theminority when he asserted the former conclusion, and urged the same upon his scientificcolleagues—few of whom were comfortable with Huxley’s agnostic conclusions.

Further underlining Kingsley’s intimacy with the scientific community, Pengelly alsointroduced Kingsley to his fellow geologists in the London Clubs, and at the GeologicalSociety of London in particular. Julian tells us that after becoming acquainted at Torquayin 1854, Pengelly and Kingsley ‘‘were afterwards accustomed to meet in London at theGeological Society of London [at Somerset House, on the Thames] and the Royal Insti-tution, [where Kingsley was later to deliver and subsequently publish his first overtly statedsupport of evolution by natural selection] as well as in the ordinary circles of social life’’(Julian 1923: 1).

Scientific Societies, London clubs and scientific institutions became an increasinglyimportant part of the nineteenth-century scientific network in the second half of thenineteenth century. Membership was often exclusive and usually accessed only throughnomination by existing members and it was a commonplace that social deportment andgentlemanly status were as important for membership as one’s scientific credentials. GivenKingsley’s public reputation for impropriety the vouchsafe of a man like Pengelly wasvaluable indeed.

Kingsley, for all his bad press, was still recognised as a gentleman—even by the authorof the critical article in Blackwood’s magazine—and the introduction by an existingmember proved sufficient. It says a lot about the changing complexion of mid-centuryscience that both Darwin and Hooker held back from nominating Huxley for membershipof the Athenæum Club for fear of how he might behave and whom he might offend(Birkhardt et al. 1990: 106; White 2003: 48). As Paul White has made clear in his study ofHuxley,—and echoing the point made by Annan about the emergence of new social classesand novel understandings of what it meant to be a gentleman,—with no inherited socialstatus to his name Huxley had to work hard to present himself as a gentleman of science(White 2003; Annan 1955). Darwin and Hooker need not have feared, Huxley was lateradmitted in 1858 having been nominated by Sir Roderick Murchison, and proved himselfquite able to conduct himself appropriately—the historian and civil servant Sir SpencerWalpole later recalled ‘‘the singular charm of his conversation, which was founded onknowledge, enlarged by memory, and brightened by humour’’ (L. Huxley 1913: II: 296).

The scientific society, perhaps more so than the gentleman’s club, provided a space whereconventional social barriers might be held in abeyance. This was especially the case at the‘conversaziones’ that were occasionally organized by these societies. Such often open-doorevents provided further (and overlapping) venues at which men with an interest in science—from all social ranks—might meet on an equal footing as ‘‘learned gentlemen’’ (Collini 1991:35). As Sam Alberti has shown, the ‘‘conversazione’’ was much more clearly under middle-class control than the high Victorian Society soiree, of which I shall have more to sayshortly.35 Conversaziones often took place in the gentlemen’s clubs and scientific societies of

35 Although Alberti has suggested that the terms ‘soiree’ and ‘conversazione’ might be used inter-changeably, it is useful to draw a distinction between these different, although related phenomena. I reservesoiree to refer to the Society gatherings at the country estates, such as those that frequently took place at TheGrange. The term ‘conversazione’ I shall reserve for this much more urban and bourgeois cultural phe-nomenon hosted by scientific societies, scientific or civic institutions, gentlemen’s clubs, either on their ownpremises, in town halls or other civic buildings, or, on occasion, at Universities. It is of note that the majorityof local societies, as well as the subtitle of Huxley’s Reader stressed art and literature along with science,each as complementary aspects of bourgeois cultural capital. With this in mind too Kingsley’s place among

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Mayfair, Pall Mall, and Belgravia, but also in provincial urban centres. In this latter case theyserved the social function of conspicuously both defining and celebrating science as a part ofnational and civic pride that sought to identify science with industry. The celebration ofnatural science took its legitimate place alongside the exhibition of other aspects of bourgeoisculture such as the arts and literature (Alberti 2003: 216).

Pengelly’s introductions served Kingsley well at the 1862 meeting too. While Kingsleycaroused with Huxley and other Thorough Club attendees in the evenings (see below),Pengelly ‘‘had the pleasure of introducing him to many eminent geologists’’ at the meetingas well. Julian notes that Kingsley was ‘‘warmly welcomed into their ranks’’ and that ‘‘inthe following year he was elected to the Geological Society of London’’ (Julian 1923: 4).36

Nominated by Bunbury and seconded by Lyell, Pengelly’s introductions had clearly servedKingsley well.37

4 Royal Patronage and the Reguis Professorship

J.M.I. Klaver, Kingsley’s most recent biographer, has made the case that Glaucus earnedKingsley the attention of the Prince Consort (Klaver 2006: 356). It certainly did, but in factboth Prince Albert and the Queen had admired Kingsley’s work long before he wroteGlaucus. Both Victoria and Prince Albert (who became the Prince Consort only in 1857),had admired Kingsley’s poetry and The Saint’s Tragedy (1848) in particular from its firstpublication and from 1859 royal patronage played a significant part in Kingsley’s career.

Kingsley’s views on sex were as controversial as his views on social reform. The Saint’sTragedy, his first book-length work, was interpreted by many reviewers as one of ques-tionable propriety, to say the least, and—as we have seen—this judgment held for hisnovels too. Indeed Saint’s Tragedy was refused by a number of publishers on account ofthis, including Murray, and was only reluctantly taken on by Parker with the insertion of asuitably pious explanatory preface by Maurice (Klaver 2006: 113).

Kingsley was fast developing a reputation for radicalism and questionable morality,however, exactly the things that might have ruined the career of another man, and whichhad clearly caused Kingsley problems, ultimately proved to be the very things that facil-itated his career. Queen Victoria, who had ascended the throne in 1837 was well known forher concern for the social condition of the English people, and she and her husbandadmired Kingsley’s social concern as well as his written work. In 1848, the same year thatKingsley established a tailor’s cooperative and was urging Wilberforce to have his ser-vant’s liveries made there, the Queen let it be known that those in attendance in herdrawing rooms would be expected to wear British-made clothes, much to the annoyance ofthe government (Hobhouse 1983: 31–32).

Thus despite the criticism that Saint’s Tragedy received from some quarters, it became aRoyal favourite—Albert apparently read it to Victoria in installments each evening, as he

Footnote 35 continuedthose that we historians have, by reason of our own specialization, tended to emphasize as ‘men of science’might raise fewer eye-brows.36 Kingsley was formally elected Fellow of the Geological Society of London, having been nominated byBunbury and seconded by Lyell at the May 20th meeting of the Society in 1863. ‘‘Annual General Meeting,Feb 19, 1864, Report of the Council’’, Quarterly Journal of the Geological Society, XXV, I, London:Longmans Green (1864, pp. i–xxix, on p. xi).37 Bunbury was a baronet, a Whig and a staunch Anglican. He married the geologist Leonard Horner’ssecond daughter, Frances, in 1844. Lyell had married Horner’s eldest daughter, Mary, in 1832.

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did later with Yeast, Hypatia and Two Years Ago. Albert had been keenly interested innatural history since his youth, an interest he had pursued through his education at theGymnasium Casimirianum academy in Coburg (Weintraub 1997: 39), and thus whenKingsley wrote Glaucus Albert read that too, but he was also moved by the plight of thepoor. A driving force behind the Crystal Palace, Albert pressed for the exhibition of modelcottages alongside the demonstrations of the industries and agriculture of the empire, andhe was active in promoting the Society for Improving the Condition of the LabouringClasses, having become its president in 1844 (Hobhouse 1983: 57–58).

Kingsley was subsequently invited to deliver a Palm Sunday service at BuckinghamPalace and shortly thereafter was appointed first, in 1859, Chaplain in Ordinary to theQueen, followed in 1860—at the suggestion of the Prince Albert and the invitation of LordPalmerston—to the position of Regius Professor of Modern History at Cambridge Uni-versity.38 A year later he was engaged as tutor to Edward the Prince of Wales, the futureEdward VII (Klaver 2006: 483–484; Weintraub 1997: 367). By all accounts Kingsley andthe young prince got on famously, the prince dining with Kingsley once a week during theterm time and taking classes with other carefully selected students twice each week.39

From Kingsley’s letters it is clear that the two discussed much more than the history ofEngland in their long walks together. Thus, in the very years that Kingsley was embracingone of the most controversial ideas of the century—Darwin’s theory of speciation bymeans of natural selection,—he was also becoming one of the most socially connectedcharacters of his day; one of the country’s most popular authors, he was also increasinglysought-after as a guest at society events.40 Darwin thus had good reason to be enthusiasticabout Kingsley’s continued support, and indeed, Kingsley only went on to become an evenmore influential spokesman for his ideas as the years passed, not only in high society, but atCambridge too.

The position as Regius Professor of History at Cambridge that the Prince had managedto secure for Kingsley was to prove important not only for his own advancement, but, andas a result, for his promotion of Darwin’s views. ‘‘Consider the noble honour of the thing &the status w. it gives me & you & the children henceforth’’, he wrote to his wife (F.Kingsley 1901; Klaver 2006: 484). The appointment was not without controversy however,for although Albert had served as Chancellor of the university from 1847 and did so until1861, the university was a house of many mansions (C.N.L. Brooke 1993: 181–182).Although invited to stand for election as Chancellor by the Vice-Chancellor and supportedby Whewell, Master of Trinity, he did not do so unopposed. Edward Herbert, second Earlof Powis contested the election, and those electors who feared the Prince would usher inreform stood firm behind the traditional mission of the University to train gentlemen inclassics and churn out clergymen. The Prince won by only the narrowest of margins, anddid indeed usher in reform, with the support of the Lord Russell and Peel, and at the urgingof Lyell and with the aid of Sedgwick the Prince oversaw the introduction of courses inmodern science and languages, law, philosophy and modern history (Hobhouse 1983:65–66; Weintraub 1997: 182–187).

38 Klaver notes that in fact Kingsley asked the Prince to secure the appointment for him, citing Kingsley’sletter to his wife in evidence: ‘‘To decline a thing after having asked for it would offend the Prince deeply’’(Klaver 2006: 484). This is indicative of the level of intimacy that Kingsley enjoyed in his contact with thePrince Consort.39 Kingsley was aided in the selection of these students by William Whewell, Master of Trinity College.40 Klaver notes that Kingsley’s offer to write a preface for Charles Henry Bennett’s illustrated edition ofPilgrim’s Progress was sufficient for Longmans publishing house to reconsider their initial refusal to takethe work (Klaver 2006: 483).

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In 1848 Kingsley had taken a deeply partisan stance in favour of university reform in AltonLocke. ‘‘To monopolize those institutions for the rich, as is done now is to violate the spirit andthe letter of the foundations’’ as was ‘‘to restrict their studies to the limits of middle-agedRomanism’’, he had boldly stated. The required subscription to the 39 Articles of theestablished church, he added, only served to admit ‘‘the reckless, the profligate, the ignorant,the hypocritical, and only excludes the honest and the conscientious, and the mass of theintellectual working men’’ (Kingsley 1881: I: 351). These words had not been forgotten by1860, even if the Prince was ultimately successful in securing Kingsley the post.

Despite the questions raised regarding his appointment as Professor of Modern History,and the mixed reception that his inaugural lecture ‘‘The Limits of Exact Science as Applied toHistory’’ received, Kingsley proved immensely popular with the undergraduates (Hesketh2011; Chadwick 1975: 311).41 His lectures drew a large and enthusiastic attendance;Kingsley could clearly captivate an audience, and his students would cheer as he reached theculminating points of his lectures; it is clear that they enjoyed his interest in their sportingactivities as well as his performance in the lecture hall—especially in the rowing.

Kingsley’s efforts to promote Darwin at Cambridge were not confined to rabble-rousingamong the undergraduates, however, and he also took pains to foster an environment ofintellectual inquiry regarding both the scientific evidence for and the theological impli-cations of evolution. He debated with those he found incredulous of Darwin’s theory,finding, as he later wrote to Darwin, that those who opposed Darwinism most vocally werethose who knew the least, including his friends at College, the Lowndean Chair ofAstronomy and Geometry, John Couch Adams and Arthur Cayley, who would, from 1863,become the first Sadleirian Professor—both were eminent mathematician-astronomers.42

Kingsley’s knowledge of natural history and familiarity with the Origin also set him ingood stead to expose the arguments of at least one anti-evolutionary pamphlet that wasdoing the rounds among the underclassmen, but he also on another occasion approachedDarwin to ask whether he had a copy of Frederick Hutton’s paper that had been publishedin the Geologist, which he ‘‘very specially want[ed] in your defense’’ (Burkhardt et al.2005: 296).43 Hutton’s paper provided a concise set of responses to the frequently askedquestions of doubters, a work that Kingsley had previously owned, but misplaced.

5 Kingsley’s Acceptance into Victorian High Society

Kingsley’s Royal patronage and position at Cambridge evidently trumped what werequickly written off as his youthful indiscretions. Fanny Kingsley recollected that oneconsequence of his appointment as Chaplin in Ordinary was that ‘‘From this time there wasa marked difference in the tone of the public press, religious and otherwise, towards him’’(F. Kingsley 1901; Klaver 2006: 467). Historian Owen Chadwick has summed up the

41 Chadwick has made clear that contrary to the opinion of some of Kingsley’s biographers, the originalobjections to Kingsley’s appointment had nothing to do with his qualification (or lack of it) for the post as anhistorian, rather, he argues that Kingsley was in fact eminently qualified. Opposition was entirely to do with hisradical political associations and his slandering of the university in Alton Locke (Chadwick 1975: 311); Vance(2009) suggests that his inaugural lecture was a success, this in contrast to C.N.L. Brooke (1993), who arguesthat Kingsley’s lecture exposed his weakness as an historian. Herbert Spencer recalled that it was ‘‘severelycriticised, if I remember rightly, when the address was originally published’’ (Spencer 1904b: 37).42 Burkhardt et al. (2005: 477–479), Crilly (2009) and Hutchins (2009).43 Also see Darwin’s reply (Burkhardt et al. 2005: 297–301). Kingsley had forgotten the author and title,Darwin suggested it must have been Hutton’s paper.

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situation, noting that Kingsley now ‘‘had reputation where formerly he had notoriety’’(Chadwick 1975: 311).

As Fanny Kingsley further testified in the Letters and Memories she prepared after herhusband’s death, ‘‘His yearly residences at Cambridge gave him not only the advantage ofassociating with scholars and men of mark in the University, but of paying visits in theneighbourhood to houses where good pictures and charming society refreshed and helpedhim through the toil of his professional work—to Wimpole, to Ampthill Park, and othercountry houses, where he and his were always made welcome’’ (Kingsley F. 1901: III:237).And this is significant. The Kingsley’s were welcome at Bunbury’s estate at Barton Hall,but these were invitations of a different order. Ampthill Park was the home of FrancisRussell, a liberal MP who in 1872 would become the 9th Duke of Bedford. Russell’s wifehad been Queen Victoria’s bride’s maid and later served as mistress of the robes. Russell,like Prince Albert was a keen experimental agriculturalist (Lloyd et al. 2004). WimpoleHouse, still the largest estate in the environs of Cambridge, was the residence of Vice-Admiral Charles Philip Yorke, 4th Earl of Hardwicke and Lord Privy Seal (1858–1859),Postmaster General and Lord Lieutenant of Cambridgeshire.44 Kingsley’s growing repu-tation and royal connections had clearly gained him entry to the highest echelons ofVictorian Society, and he and his were subsequently invited to attend the soirees andparties at these and other residences that characterized the Season (Davidoff 1973).

In the context of reconstructing the relationship between science and Society in thisperiod, James Secord has drawn attention to the importance of conversation as an area ofinvestigation hitherto given scant consideration by historians of science (Secord 2007).Conversation served a number of purposes at Society gatherings, both cementing, as wellas policing the boundaries of those that made up the social elite (Alberti 2003: 216). Oneimportant marker of this was knowing the rules of the game, so-to-speak, as well of course,as having the ability to play—of knowing what one might talk about and to whom—exactly the reservations that Darwin and Hooker had initially held about the young Huxley(Secord 2007).45 While those who were secure in their inheritance might be concerned toappear the lion of the party rather than a social bore in order to satisfy their own vanity,—or to impress eligible young ladies—for those who had a more tenuous entry to Society,such as the self-made men of science and letters who might be graced with an invitation,either a faux pas or the appearance of pedantry might result in being cut from future guestlists all together (Secord 2000: 164).46 Despite his lifelong stammer and controversialpersonal history Kingsley evidently proved as great a success with his Society hosts as hehad with his students. Bunbury was certainly sincere in his recollection followingKingsley’s death, that ‘‘I hardly think I have ever known a man whose conversation was socharming,—so rich in matter, so various, so easy and unassuming, so instructive, yet so

44 Yorke attained the rank of Admiral in 1863.45 Darwin and Hooker need not have been concerned, as Huxley later proved himself to be the most amiablecompany in conversation. Spencer Walpole was only one who recalled ‘the singular charm of his con-versation, which was founded on knowledge, enlarged by memory, and brightened by humour’ (Huxley L.1913: II:296).46 Also see George Cruikshank’s cartoons from 1845 (Secord 2000: 179). On being cut, Alfred RusselWallace, for example, recounts his own experience of offending his hostess at Stratton Street, Lady Burdett-Coutts, by stating his opinion too freely, and as a result ‘‘was never invited again’’ (Wallace 1905: II:51–52).Barabara and Hensleigh Wedgwood note that such a standard was also defining of the middle class dinner-party set, where ‘‘Throughout dinner, the well-dressed guests, both men and women, were expected to beclever, agreeable, and au courant with art, literature, politics, science and theology… those who did notmeasure up conversationally failed to survive socially’’ (Wedgwood & Wedgwood 1980: 275).

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free from dogmatism and from any preaching or lecturing tone, [he was] sensibility,humour, wisdom, so happily blended’’ (Bunbury 1894: III: 59).

Of course, it is also quite possible that rather than a detriment to his new-found pop-ularity, now that Chartism was a dead movement, Kingsley’s past notoriety might haveadded to his attractiveness as a valued Society guest, especially in light of his broadknowledge and outspokenness on the most pressing issues of the day.47 Kingsley wascertainly a success in this regard, however much he might complain to his wife (althoughwith what is surely a measure of false modesty) ‘‘I hate being made a lion of’’ (Kingsley F.1901: III:258).

Science was one topic that was deemed a suitable subject for conversation at Societyevents, and natural history in particular. Secord tells us in Victorian Sensation (2000) thatworks like the anonymous Vestiges were frequently set up as talking points at fashionablesoirees during the season of their publication and it is clear from Kingsley’s accounts thatDarwin and his work were the hot topic of discussion at such gatherings throughout the1860s. This was only more so after the adventurer and discoverer Paul du Chaillu broughtthe first gorilla specimens to England from Africa—in the process making the somewhatesoteric morphological points of contention between Huxley and Owen at the BritishAssociation suddenly seem very much closer to home.48

Who better to have as a weekend guest to keep conversation interesting than Kingsley,not only a popular author, but also a man who was well-credentialed to speak to both thescientific and the theological implications at stake in the evolution debates? For although,as Secord and Sam Alberti have noted, the open expression of heterodox ideas might beseen as bad manners in polite society, Kingsley’s virtue in this regard was his ability tospeak both sensitively as well as knowledgably to the concerns of all comers (Secord 2007:141; Alberti 2003: 216).

Kingsley’s charm could be incisive, but subtle enough not to cause offense. Huxleyclearly took great pleasure in recounting to his colleague, Frederick Dyster, the story ofKingsley’s response to being admonished for associating himself with such unorthodoxviews as those expressed in Origin by the renowned hostess, the ‘‘Evergreen Marchio-ness,’’ Lady Maria Elizabeth Ailsbury. Also of the Royal household, and a long-establishedand popular, if matronly, figure at Society parties, Ailsbury’s opinion was one that mat-tered. On this occasion, in 1860, Kingsley had certainly been disarming. As Huxley relatedthe occasion:

He is an excellent Darwinian to begin with, and told me a capital story of his reply to Lady Aylesbury[sic] who expressed her astonishment at his favouring such a heresy—‘What can be more delightfulto me Lady Aylesbury, than to know that your Ladyship & myself sprang from the same toad stool.’Whereby the frivolous old woman shut up, in doubt whether she was being chaffed or adored for herremark.49

However the Marchioness took Kingsley’s comment, this last sentence is telling testi-mony of the acceptance of Kingsley’s opinion as that of an expert, as much as of someone

47 Secord (2007) notes the increasing importance of celebrity as well as accomplishment at the soiree.48 Secord (2000: 155–190) especially 187, Secord (2007: 147) and Rushing (1990).49 Thomas Huxley to Frederick Dyster, 29 February 1860, HP, 15. 110. On Maria Elizabeth Tollemache,Lady Ailsbury, see Gibbs (1910: I:64), especially note (e): ‘‘For nearly 60 years the ‘evergreen MariaMarchioness’, sprightly, gay and universally popular, was a constant frequenter of London parties andcountry race courses, and was to be seen in Hyde Park with flaxen hair (or wig), driving two ponies,generally preceded by two outriders.’’ The family seat was Tottenham House in Savernake Forest, near.Marlborough, but following her husband’s death in 1856 it seems she spent more time in rooms reserved forher in Windsor Castle.

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whose opinion was shielded by Royal patronage. Indeed, despite the potential for Dar-winism to be controversial, the fact that Kingsley proposed a reconciliation of scientificnaturalism and Anglican faith in his own particular reconception of a post-Darwiniannatural theology would also have prevented discussion of the topic appearing improper, asSecord again points out, ‘‘Talk about God’s providential laws could smooth over thesekinds of potentially awkward social situations’’ (Secord 2000: 162).50 In any case, asKlaver has pointed out, it was clear to all—with few exceptions—that the Kingsley of1860, the Cambridge don, member of the Royal Household and literary lion, was a far cryfrom the Kingsley of 1848, from Chartism, and the Christian Socialist movement (Klaver2006: 472).51

It was in the course of this new flurry of society invitations that Kingsley and his wifealso found themselves frequently invited to ‘‘The Grange,’’ the extensive country estate ofLord and Lady Ashburton in Alresford, Hampshire.52 The Grange, more so perhaps thanthe other country seats mentioned above, was a well known society venue. The secondLady Ashburton, Louisa Caroline Stewart-Mackenzie kept up the tradition established byher husband’s first wife, Lady Harriet Baring, who had been one of the better-known andmore respected of Victorian Society hostesses, her weekend and sometimes month-and-more soirees echoing the salons of an earlier age.53 Louisa Caroline frequently broughtprominent men of arts and letters together to discuss the latest matters of interest andcontroversy, and, as Kingsley subsequently wrote to Darwin, in 1862 he had had occasionto defend both Darwin and his writings in these conversations.54 As Kingsley reported, inone instance, the bringing down of a brace of ‘‘Blue Rock’’ pigeons by a shooting-partynaturally turned conversation to the Origin. Pigeons, of course, being the subject of muchof the opening chapter:

I have just returned from Lord Ashburton’s where the Duke of Argyll, the Bp. of Oxford, & I, havenaturally talked much about you and your book. As for the Bp. you know what he thinks - & moreimportant, you know what he knows.The Duke is in vy different mood; calm, liberal, ready to hear all reason, though puzzled as every onemust be, by a hundred questions wh. You have opened (Burkhardt et al. 1997: 62–64).55

50 Kingsley had been inspired by Maurice’s Kingdom of Christ [1842], which appealed for a broad churchunity, see Maurice (1958).51 As Klaver points out the views of the author of the accompanying text to the 1872 Vanity Fair caricatureof Kingsley could equally have been written of Kingsley in 1859: ‘‘Time and opinions move so fast that it isdifficult to recall the period, though it is really so recent, when the Rev. Charles Kingsley, sometime authorof ‘‘Alton Locke’’ and now Chaplain to the Queen… was one of the most daring and advanced revolutionistsof his cloth.’’52 William Bingham Baring, and the second Lady Asburton, Louisa Caroline Stuart Mackenzie. LadyHarriet, the first Lady Ashburton, died in 1857, Baring married Louisa Caroline in 1858.53 For instance, of the Grange under the first Lady Ashburton see: Jane Carlyle to Mrs. Russell, 29December 1848, ‘‘we staid 6 weeks at a fine place called The Grange, belonging to Lord Ashburton. Thevisit was anything but a retirement; for in London we should not have seen half so many people, - the housebeing filled with company the whole time’’ (Carlyle 1893: 250). For Louisa Caroline’s role as a patron of thearts and a socialite see the Asburton Papers which are in the process of being made available online at:http://www.nls.uk/catalogues/online/cnmi/inventories/acc11388.pdf.54 At the Ashburton’s it seems likely that Kingsley was one of the more scientifically informed men present.Specific study of the particular venues, hosts and guests at the various Society gatherings, however, wouldbe revealing.55 Argyll had hitherto confessed himself unconvinced by Darwin’s use of pigeon breeding as a satisfactorymetaphor for selection in nature, both in his 1860 Presidential Address to the Royal Society of Edinburghand in private conversation with Charles Lyell (Burkhardt et al. 1997: 64 n. 4).

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These gatherings were thus clearly not all shooting and fishing, but also frequentlyincluded discussion of science—perhaps somewhat unsurprising given the make-up of thisparticular shooting party.56 Importantly though, the Society setting allowed Kingsley toengage his companions in frank and open discussion of the implications of Darwin’s workin a way that might not have been possible in less-select company. In addition, Kingsley’sfamiliarity with Wilberforce, his diocesan at Eversley (Kingsley F. 1901: III:103) and laterwith George Douglas Campbell, the Eighth Duke of Argyll, provided the opportunity forhim to make the case that Darwin’s theories of selection and speciation were quite com-patible with Anglican orthodoxy. As Kingsley related to Darwin, he ‘‘was called on todecide [the matter].’’ (Burkhardt et al. 1997: 63). Argyll had previously expressed hisbelief that the analogy of pigeon breeding ‘‘fails fundamentally’’ to substantiate speciationin nature, having confided to Lyell in February 1860 that ‘‘As regards the effects ofbreeding, I think the facts he gives in respect to pigeons tell more against than for histheory’’ (Campbell 1906: II: 482.)57 However, as Kingsley continued: ‘‘My own view is—& I coolly stated it, fearless of consequences—that the specimen before me was only to beexplained on your theory… to shew how your views are steadily spreading— …of 5 or 6men, only one [, presumably the Bishop,] regarded such a notion as absurd’’ (Burkhardtet al. 1997: 63).

Despite Kingsley’s deference to the Bishop in matters of Church orthodoxy, his lack ofregard for Wilberforce’s opinion in scientific matters is clear from this letter, as isKingsley’s confidence—at least in such a setting—that the expression of unorthodox ideaswould not harm his career. However, he was clearly impressed by the Duke.58 Kingsleywrote to Huxley of the occasion of his success; and of the jokes they had clearly made atHuxley’s expense: ‘‘We had great fun about you with the Bishop of Oxford, MonktonMilnes and the good little Duke, at Lord Ashburton’s. You cannot conceive how Darwin’sviews are spreading.’’59

In the August following the 1862 Season, and less than 6 months after this meeting atThe Grange, Kingsley, his wife and young son Maurice spent a month vacationing inScotland, a trip which included a week at Murthly Castle in the company of Lord JohnManners and Sir Hugh Cairns, followed by a stay with Argyll at his Scottish country home,Inverary Castle.60 As Don Opitz has indicated in his study of science in the Victoriancountry house, ‘‘Thriving among the aristocracy was a wide network indeed of countryhouses infused in scientific thought and practice, intimately linked across broad distances

56 Richard Monkton Milnes was one of the unnamed guests present, Charles Kingsley to Thomas HenryHuxley, 20 February (1862, Imperial College, 19, 203–204). The following year Milnes was made 1st BaronHoughton, and became a very influential figure among the literary set. Like Kingsley, he too was interestedin theology and education.57 Argyll had also expressed scepticism on this point both in his 1860 Presidential Address to the RoyalSociety of Edinburgh and in private conversation with Charles Lyell (Burkhardt et al. 1997: 64, n. 4).58 Kingsley had once deferred to his Bishop on the order of service, abandoning his long established habit ofprayer prior to his sermon (Kingsley F. 1901: II:103). Kingsley admired much of the Duke’s argument, butwith reservations. See Kingsley’s correspondence with Darwin on the matter below.59 Charles Kingsley to Thomas Henry Huxley, 20 February (1862, HP, 19, 203–204).60 The height of the Season dated from May to July (Davidoff 1973). Manners was a graduate of TrinityCollege, Cambridge and prominent statesman. In the 1840s he had also been a prominent voice in the YoungEngland movement. Cairns, appointed Solicitor General and Knighted in 1858 was, like Kingsley concernedwith child welfare, being a keen supporter of Barnardo, as well as a keen sportsman, once claiming that heonly practiced law so as to afford to keep Hunters.

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through tightly knit social relations’’ (Opitz 2005: 145). Inverary was one such household.As Mrs. Kingsley recounted,

The visit to Inveraray was one of the bright memories and green spots of his [Kingsley’s] life, andalways looked back upon by himself and those who were with him with gratitude, combining as it didnot only beautiful scenery [and the successful fishing!], but intellectual, scientific, and spiritualcommunings on the highest, holiest themes (Kingsley F. 1901: III:144).

It is evident from these last comments that this more intimate visit allowed Kingsley andArgyll to return to the subject of God’s place in a Darwinian world, and the sufficiency, ornot, of selection to explain and account for the many beautiful as well as the usefulcontrivances exhibited in nature. Following these discussions, Argyll went on to engageDarwin deeply and thoughtfully over the apparent design in nature—and upon the exis-tence of natural beauty as evidence of this in particular. He wrote extensively critiquing thesufficiency of natural selection to explain every aspect of nature in the Edinburgh Review,and Good Words, expanding upon doubts he had first expressed in his 1860 PresidentialAddress to the Royal Society of Edinburgh. These enquiries eventually formed the basis ofThe Reign of Law (1867), a work in which he attempted to reconcile the Anglican faithwith a God that worked exclusively through law (Campbell [1867]). It was this work thatKingsley had in mind when he had commented to Darwin that the Duke had entirelyoverlooked the significance of sexual selection.

As well as being an important advocate for natural selection, Kingsley was thus one ofthe very first to also recognise the role of sexual selection.61 In light of their correspon-dence on the Duke’s position, and encouraged by Kingsley’s favourable reception ofsexual as well as natural selection Darwin wrote ‘‘I had hoped to see a review by you on theReign of Law,’’ but he was to remain disappointed—at least no review by Kingsley hasbeen found (Burkhardt et al. 2005: 421).

For Kingsley, the highlight of this trip, however, was that the two men did more thanjust talk about science, and he wrote to his mother, clearly ecstatic: ‘‘We are going out todredge sea-beasts, live Terebratulas!!!! and I will bring you some’’ (Kingsley F. 1901: III:144).62 Kingsley’s excitement was understandable. It was dredging that had been hisinitiation into the scientific community with Gosse and Pengelly on the Devonshire coast.Further, Kingsley was familiar with Terebratulas, a genus of brachiopod that includesmany living as well as some now extinct fossil species. From his own studies, however,Kingsley knew only the fossilized forms as described by John Phillips in his PalæozoicFossils of Cornwall, Devon and West Somerset (1841), and had clearly never encountered aliving specimen.—One can only surmise the conversation that must have ensued betweenKingsley and Argyll as to exactly what light the Origin might have thrown upon thisparticular phenomenon. By Kingsley’s account, at least, Argyll was ‘‘ready to hear allreason’’, and despite his reservations, his thoughtful consideration of the issues led to hisbecoming known as ‘‘the Darwinian Duke’’ (Browne 2002: 307).

Fired with enthusiasm for Darwin’s ideas, and even before his trip to Scotland, Kingsleyhad written to Huxley of his intention to attend the 1862 British Association meeting thatwas to convene in the city, declaring that he would be keeping an ‘‘open house,’’ heexpressed the hope that the two might find the time to meet.63—Alfred Russel Wallace,who was also in attendance at the meetings for the first time, was among those who ‘‘had

61 For more on Kingsley’s unorthodox and passionate views on sex see Chitty (1975).62 A genus of brachiopods which includes many living and some fossil species.63 Charles Kingsley to Thomas Huxley, 18th July (1862, HP, 19, 205. 19).

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the pleasure of spending an evening with Charles Kingsley in his own house, and enjoyinghis stimulating conversation’’ (Wallace 1905: II:45). Kingsley’s stated intention inattending, he told Huxley, was to ensure ‘‘fair play,’’ promising that ‘‘if anybody tries to getup a ‘religious’ controversy… then will I shew you that I [too] have teeth and claws, and[take] especial pleasure in worrying a parson, just because I am a good churchman.’’64

In saying as much, Kingsley was only re-emphasizing a position he had staked out sometwo years earlier. In the flurry of deeply earnest letters that the two men had exchanged inthe wake of the death of Huxley’s young son Noel, Kingsley, like Huxley, had bared hissoul:

What you say about scientific men and the Church of England I am well aware of. All I can answer isthat standing, as I do (rightly or wrongly) on both grounds, I will do my little best to see fair play forthe men of science. Them I love, them I trust, with them I should like, had I my wish, to live anddie.65

It was at this meeting that Huxley was to renew his attack on Richard Owen over themorphological similarities or differences between man and ape. This was a debate that hadits origins in the Oxford meeting, but this time around saw not only Huxley, but a widearray of authorities on the matter reject Owen’s conclusions outright.66

Owen had refuted the existence of the small structure known as the hippocampus minorin the brains of apes, upon which, according to the account in the Times, Mr. WilliamFlower, an ardent Darwinian, friend of Huxley and recently appointed conservator at theHunterian Museum of the Royal College of Surgeons, decided the question with theimprobable announcement: ‘‘I happen to have in my pocket a monkey’s brain.’’ Theproduction of the said organ allowed Huxley to demonstrate that it did indeed exhibit thedebated character (Fletcher 2004).

Annual meetings—then, as now,—served the vital discipline-building functions of theexchange of ideas, forging and cementing alliances, and of networking. Kingsley hadevidently witnessed Huxley’s victory and the two, who were by now fast friends, took theircelebrations of this victory over Owen into the last evening of the conference, at whatbecame the inaugural meeting of the Thorough Club, on the 7th October.67 The dinner thatbecame the Thorough Club had originally been intended to be a serious ‘‘Ibis’’ dinner forthe ornithologists, hosted by Alfred Newton, the Drury Traveling Fellow at MagdaleneCollege and editor of the ornithological journal Ibis. The Thorough appropriated the tra-dition of the long established ‘‘Red Lion Club’’, an informal dining, joking, drinking, andspeechifying club, which quickly became an alternative to the official meeting banquetwhose members ‘‘fed together during each meeting of the association and expressedapplause by gentle roars and wagging of (coat) tails’’ (Wallace 1905: II:47–48). Appro-priately set to meet at the Lion Hotel in Cambridge, Huxley and Kingsley, appear to havehijacked the occasion, declaring it a meeting of a ‘‘club for the promotion of commonhonesty,’’ Huxley taking Chair, with Kingsley as Vice (Raby 2001: 170; Barton 1998:

64 Charles Kingsley to Thomas Huxley, 4th August (1862, HP, 19, 207, 19).65 Charles Kingsley to Thomas Huxley, 26 September (1860, HP, 19, 186–187).66 See Burkhardt et al. (1997: 449–451) for Huxley’s account, plus notes. Also Browne (2002: 156–160).Owen’s papers, both delivered on October 3rd to Section D, were, ‘‘On the zoological significance of thecerebral and pedial characters of man,’’ and ‘‘On the characters of the Aye–Aye, as a test of the Lamarckianand Darwinian hypotheses of the transmutation and origin of species.’’67 See Huxley’s dinner invitation, Huxley Papers, 31: 121, and the draft constitution, Huxley Papers, 31:120.

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442–443, especially n.3).68—The concern with ‘‘common honesty’’ was clear comment onthe apparent lack of this quality displayed by Owen in his own presentation to section Dearlier in the week. The founding statement, although jotted on a napkin among thefrivolities, is serious comment on the bond that cemented Kingsley and Huxley’s friend-ship and their common purpose—‘‘The primary object of this club is the promotion of athorough and earnest search after scientific truth particularly in matters relating tobiology.’’69

Although the Red Lions continued to meet and dine annually at each subsequentAssociation meeting the ‘‘Thorough Club’’ appears not to have been so long-lived,—RuthBarton cites Marian Evans as dating its demise to the March of 1863 (Barton 1998: 443,n.83).70 Huxley clearly had high hopes for the club, and wrote to Darwin shortly after theinaugural meeting encouraging his membership, however, the serious concerns that Huxleywanted to address only later found their expression in the much more exclusive X-Club(Burkhardt et al. 1997: 449–451).71 Nevertheless, it is significant that Kingsley clearlyfitted well and easily into such company and spoke of an invitation to dine with the ‘‘RedLions’’ again at the 1867 meetings—the membership of the ‘‘Thorough’ and the ‘‘RedLions’’ clearly overlapping.

During the evenings of the meeting Kingsley, who had given the human relationshipwith apes a significant amount of thought, and discussed the matter with both Huxley andDarwin, not only wrote a comic skit on the debate between Owen and Huxley for privatecirculation, but also sketched out a parody of the encounter between the two eminentanatomists which later appeared in his evolutionary fairytale Water Babies, which had beenappearing serially in Macmillan’s Magazine from that August.72

In Water Babies the debate over the hippocampus minor became the great debate aboutthe ‘‘Hippopotamus Major’’ and Kingsley, of course, whilst he clearly sided with Huxleyover the issue, could not help but ridicule the whole episode and the importance which bothmen attached to its outcome. On the one hand, it seemed that Owen was prepared to denythe evidence of his own eyes—evidence well established by a number of authorities evenbefore Flower had so dramatically facilitated its empirical demonstration—and simplyrefused to admit this point of morphological similarity, let alone the theory of commonancestry of man and ape which Huxley hung upon it.73 Huxley, on the other hand, tried tomake the case not only for common ancestry, but that man could be fully accounted for interms of material nature alone. To Kingsley, both men were misguided, but Owen the moreso. To deny the evidence before one’s eyes was clearly against the grain, both in scienceand in natural theology. Huxley, on the other hand, was certainly sincere, but to Kingsley’s

68 Newton had witnessed Huxley’s demonstration of the hippocampus minor, and while clearly convincedhe thought that Huxley and Flower had been savage to Owen (Wollaston 1921). Invitations to dine with the‘‘thorough’’ were quickly printed; the cost of the dinner was 12 s. 6d. See HP 31.121.69 HP 31:120.70 See also George Eliot’s letters to Sara Sophia Hennell, 26 November 1862 and 9 March 1863, in Haight(1955: IV:66 & 78).71 It is notable that the ‘‘Thorough’’ was mooted as name for what became the ‘‘X’’, however, as HerbertSpencer recalled, ‘‘the historical associations negatived it’’ (Spencer 1904a, b: II:134).72 Kingsley wrote a short skit in the style of Lord Dundreary which is reproduced in Kingsley F. (1901:III:145–148).73 Which is quite bizarre, of course, given that Owen seriously hinted at common ancestry in his famousessay ‘‘On the Nature of Limbs’’ in which, as Ron Amundson notes, Owen forged a middle ground in theongoing debate over the relative merits of form and function in comparative anatomy (Amundson 2007:xxxi); see also Rupke (2009) who refutes the caricature of Owen as merely a dogmatic anti-evolutionist.

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mind, had erroneously taken no account of the human soul—a point on which he subse-quently took Huxley to task:

I know an ape’s brain and throat are almost exactly like a man’s—and what does that prove?… Ifmen had had apes bodies they would have got on very tolerably with them, because they had men’ssouls to work the bodies with. While an ape’s soul in a man’s body would be only a rather more filthynuisance than he is now (Kingsley F. 1901: III:176).

Kingsley not only urged reconciliation upon men of science, but also upon his fellowChurchmen, his position as a ‘‘good churchman’’ also gave him leave to discuss thetheological implications of Darwinism behind-closed doors, a campaign that Kingsleycarried on throughout the rest of his career, even following his appointment as Canon ofChester in 1870.

Despite the initial reservations of John Saul Howson, the Dean of Chester, aboutwhether such a controversial figure as Kingsley was fitted for Cathedral life, the twoquickly discovered shared scientific as well as spiritual interests and became fast friends.Howson was chair of the Chester Archeological Society, and Kingsley quickly establisheda popular (and still extant) Chester Society for Natural History, Science and Art shortlyafter his arrival in the city, enrolling Lyell, Phillip Egerton, Hooker, Huxley, and JohnTyndall, as well as other notables as honorary members (Kingsley F. 1901: IV: 91).Recalling the Canon’s service to the city of Chester, Howson wrote to Fanny Kingsleyrecalling her late husband’s compelling and articulate conversation on matters of scienceand theology.

I must refer to the good done here by Canon Kingsley in the course of casual conversations. Greateffects are produced in this way by certain men; and he produced them without being aware of it…On being asked how he reconciled Science and Christianity, he said, ‘By believing that God is love.’On another occasion, when the slow and steady variation of Mollusca, traced from stratum to stratum,was pointed out by a friend, with the remark that Darwin’s explanation would hardly be consideredorthodox, he observed, ‘‘My friend, God’s orthodoxy is truth; if Darwin speaks the truth, he isorthodox (Kingsley F. 1901: IV:154).74

In the January following his arrival in Chester, Kingsley was invited to give a lecture atSion College, the London Anglican theological college, and chose for his subject ‘‘TheNatural Theology of the Future,’’ a lecture in which he urged upon his audience thenecessity for theologians to seek reconciliation with the revealed facts of natural science,Darwin’s work included. Echoing the sentiments of the reassurances he offered to Howson,he declared:

I sometimes dream of a day when it will be considered necessary that every candidate for ordinationshould be required to have passed creditably in at least one branch of physical science, if it be only toteach him the method of sound scientific thought. And if it be said that the doctrine of evolution, bydoing away with the theory of creation, does away with that of final causes—let us answer boldly,Not in the least. We might accept what Mr. Darwin and Professor Huxley have written on physicalscience, and yet preserve our natural theology on exactly the same basis as that on which Butler andPaley left it. That we should have to develop it, I do not deny. That we should have to relinquish it, Ido (Kingsley F. 1901: IV:87).

Kingsley’s efforts in defense of Darwin both at Cambridge and further-a-field were notwithout effect, and he later wrote to Darwin to inform him of the sea-change that hadoccurred at the university between the early post-Origin days and his return to the city inthe winter of 1867:

74 For Kingsley’s friendship with Howson see Martin (1958: 19, n. 3).

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My Dear Mr. Darwin, I have been here 3 or 4 days; & have been accidentally drawn, again & again,into what the world calls Darwinism, & you & I & some others [call] fact & science—I have beendrawn thereinto, simply because I find everyone talking about it: all shewing how men’s minds arestirred.I find the best and strongest men coming over…& I find in Cambridge, that the younger M.A.’s arenot only willing, but greedy, to hear what you have to say; and that the elder (who have of coursemore old notions to overcome) are facing the whole question in a quite different tone from what theydid 3 years ago… I trust you will find the good old university… to be your finest standing ground inthese isles (Burkhardt et al. 2005: 477–479).

Darwin was again thankful for Kingsley’s confidence, and made it clear in his response thathe believed Kingsley to be the primary reason for such a welcome turn-around. ‘‘Althoughyou are so kind as to tell me not to write,’’ he responded, ‘‘I must send a few lines to thankyou for your letter. It is very interesting and surprising to me that you find at Cambridgeafter so short an interval a greater willingness to accept the views which we both admit. Ido not doubt that this is largely owing to a man so eminent as yourself venturing to speakout. The mass of educated men will always sooner or later follow those, whose knowledgethey recognise on any special study…’’ (Burkhardt et al. 2005: 480).

Kingsley’s social mobility did not divert him from continuing to exercise an influence inthe world of publishing,—not only as an author, but as an editor as well. In addition to hisefforts at Cambridge and in Society, Kingsley advanced Darwinian science through hiscontributions to the popular periodicals of the day. Kingsley was well known as a reviewerfor both Macmillan’s Magazine and the North British Review and had also had a hand inThe Reader: A Review of Literature, Science, and Art (Byrne 1964).75 Although under theproprietorship and editorship of John Ludlow—the paper was originally dominated byChristian Socialist authors—it increasingly took on a more scientific bent as, from 1864,Huxley joined with Norman Lockyer, Hooker, Tyndall, Herbert Spencer, and Darwin,amongst others, to support and staff the paper (Byrne 1964; Roos 1985).

Although by the following year Huxley’s interest had turned largely from the Reader tothe Fortnightly Review, Kingsley had seen enough of Huxley’s energy and ability forengaging the public in serious discussion of science that when he later found himself in theposition of temporary editor of Fraser’s in the April of 1867, he immediately appealed toHuxley, as well as a number of his other scientific friends and acquaintances for copy, withthe expressed intention of keeping the scientific arguments in favour of Darwin in thepublic mind.76 As he put it to Alfred Newton, who was by this time the first professor ofzoology and comparative anatomy at Cambridge,

I want to make it gradually a vehicle for advanced natural science, and have written to several leadingmen in that sense… Do pray help me, and, if you are good enough, make John Clark, or any of yourfriends, help me also, and we will try and get a little real natural history into folks heads (Kingsley F.1901: III: 252).77

Kingsley had indeed written to a number of ‘‘leading men,’’ including Lyell, Bunbury,Huxley and Darwin. Darwin again wrote in appreciation of Kingsley’s efforts, butdemurred; busy with the proofs of Variation of Animals and Plants under Domestication he

75 On the history of the Reader, see John Francis Byrne. ‘‘The Reader: A Review of Literature, Science, andthe Arts, 1863–1867’’, Ph.D. Thesis, Northwestern University, 1964.76 J. A. Froude, Kingsley’s brother in law was the editor, and was travelling in Spain researching his multi-volume History of England from the Fall of Wolsey to the Defeat of the Spanish Armada.77 John Willis Clark (1833–1910) was a Fellow of Trinity College and in 1866 had been appointedsuperintendant of the museum of zoology and secretary to the museum and lecture rooms syndicate. He wasa talented systematist (James and Pickles 2004).

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declined taking on more work (Burkhardt et al. 2005: 242–243). Kingsley’s attempts topack Fraser’s with a little ‘‘advanced natural science’’ were not entirely unfruitful,however, Newton wrote on the ‘‘Birds of Norfolk’’, Bunbury on the ‘‘Flora of SouthAmerica’’ and Kingsley himself wrote the prose idyll ‘‘A Charm of Birds,’’ having firstpumped Newton for ‘‘any Darwinite lore about the development of birds’’ (Kingsley F.1901: III:252 & 253).78 It was in Fraser’s too that Kingsley also published the two lectureshe gave to the Royal Institution on ‘‘Science’’ and ‘‘Superstition’’ in June and July of 1867respectively—as mentioned above, aside from Water Babies, the two were his firstconfession of faith as a Darwinian in print and he humbly sent them along to Darwin,suggesting: ‘‘I think you will find that I am not unmindful of your teaching’’ (Kingsley F.1901: III:255–256).

Kingsley was thus unceasing in his efforts to promote Darwin. It was later that year,1867, and following hard on the heels of his visit to Murthly and Inverary, that Kingsleyattended the British Association meeting in Dundee, and again he was welcomed amongthe most eminent men of science as one of their own. He dined with the ‘‘Red Lions,’’before finding himself sat at dinner later in the week in the more formal setting of theAssociation banquet among some of the most eminent geologists in the British Isles(Kingsley F. 1901: III: 258). Kingsley had been present in Dundee to hear ArchibaldGeikie, then newly elected Director General of the Geological Survey of Scotland, andPresident of the Geological Section, deliver his Presidential Address, but also to deliver anevening lecture on ‘‘the origin of the present scenery of Scotland’’ based on the geologicaltheories of James Hutton and John Playfair (Geikie 1924: 118).

The following day the University of St. Andrews hosted a banquet in honour of theAssociation, and, as Kingsley reported to his wife: ‘‘I sat at dinner between dear oldPhillips [Professor John Phillips, Assistant General to the British Association] and Geikie,with Grant-Duff next, who has asked me to come on and visit him if I have time, and killhis Salmon. Hurrah!’’ (Kingsley F. 1901: III:258) Geikie recalled Kingsley’s presence atthe dinner in his autobiography, noting that Kingsley had praised his lecture as ‘‘a kind ofrevelation to him of what he had for years been groping and grubbing for’’ (Geikie 1924:118). Also at the dinner was Professor J. Campbell, a geologist at St. Andrews. Kingsleyhad been impressed by his book Frost and Fire (1865) and had written in advance of themeeting to ask his opinion on a number of issues (J. Campbell 1865; Kingsley F. 1901: III:257). According to a local paper and in evidence of the level of appreciation thatKingsley’s work as a popularizer was held among practicing geologists, ‘‘ProfessorCampbell, St. Andrews, then proposed [a toast to] ‘The Literature of Science’, coupling itwith the name of Prof. Kingsley…’’ Kingsley, in return, then stood ‘‘to return thanks forthe unexpected honour of coupling his name with any toast within these learned walls, andespecially in connection with the meeting of such a body as the British Association’’(Kingsley F. 1901: III:259, n.1.) The assembled party was clearly aware of the importanceof men like Kingsley to advancing the cause of science.—After all, as Paul White hasnoted, ‘‘Though [he was] clearly operating within the newly designated genre of popularscience… Charles Kingsley produced volumes that rivaled or exceeded in influence thoseof Huxley, Tyndall, and other elites’’ (White 2003: 75).

In addition to writing popular science, Kingsley was also clearly thinking seriouslyabout writing his own contribution to post-Darwinian science, as Darwin had urged him todo at their first meeting, and in which he was encouraged by his other scientific friends,Lyell and Bunbury in particular. As is evident from Kingsley’s correspondence, he had

78 This essay has recently been reprinted in Hale and Smith (2011)

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been slowly amassing facts in support of a comprehensive account of the geology andnatural history of the Bagshot Sands, a subject that brought him to consider biogeographyas it related to geology, and took him as far afield as Dundee in search of answers. This wasa subject that he had introduced in both his lectures to working men, and in his popularworks, Madam How and Lady Why (1869) in particular (Kingsley 1920: 93–97). As he hadwritten to his mentor Frederick Maurice, the science in these works, even—and espe-cially—in Water Babies, was ‘‘not nonsense, but accurate earnest, as far as I dare speakyet,’’ and at the same time he confided his intentions to write something of a more seriousbent ‘‘in some 7 years hence,’’ not wishing to rush in with half-baked ill-considered ideas(Kingsley F. 1901: III:142).

This was a project that Kingsley had been working on, albeit intermittently, for muchlonger than 7 years at the time of his untimely death in 1875, sending and receivingcorrespondence from amateurs and recognised experts alike. By mid 1863 he was writingto Bunbury that he believed Lyell had overlooked the geology of the Bagshot Sands regionwhen making the overarching claim in Antiquity of Man (1869) that the whole of Englandsouth of the Thames had been laid during the glacial period. In a detailed letter to thecontrary Kingsley explained his reasons for believing that ‘‘the whole [from south of theThames] to the Bagshot sand district was ice-traveled sea at that period, and during thatperiod rose slowly out of the sea,’’ describing at length both his own observations and thoseof his correspondents in support of his conclusions (Kingsley F. 1901: III:174–175). AsKingsley later confessed to Bunbury, it was his hope, upon accepting his appointment tothe Canonry of Westminster in 1873, that he would finally be freed to write ‘‘deliberately,but not for daily bread,’’ and thus find the time to really get into this project. He alsoconfirmed Bunbury’s view of his preferment that it would bring him into closer proximityto ‘‘scientific society, libraries etc.’’ (Kingsley F. 1901: IV:155). It was not to be, however.Finding other projects, Kingsley never quite found the time to write his own big book, afact that both Bunbury and Lyell sorely lamented upon his premature death.

Following the resignation of his Cambridge Professorship in 1869, Kingsley had writtento his friend William Carpenter, Fullerian Professor of Physiology at the Royal Institution,that with his new-found freedom from lecturing he was ‘‘intending henceforth to devotemyself to my first love, physical science, as far as is compatible with my parish duties.’’(Kingsley F. 1901: IV:32). His celebrity, his ability, and his knowledge led his scientificfriends to make sure that he made good on this intention, and he found himself invited tospeak as an authority at conversaziones. Indeed, it was not long before he was writinggood-natured complaints to Pengelly about his increasingly hectic scientific schedule.Doubtless at Pengelly’s suggestion, the Devonshire Association had asked Kingsley to takeon their Presidency for 1871 an honour that required that he address their meeting inBideford that year. The secretary of the Association, acting on behalf of the publisher oftheir annual Report and Transactions, had pressed Kingsley for the text of his PresidentialAddress some weeks in advance. Clearly feeling the pressure, Kingsley had written toPengelly, half in complaint, and half, it seems, to excuse his delay: ‘‘I have had a pre-posterous request through ___ [Rev. W. Harpley] the Secretary, that I should send them theMS. of my address by the 4th. Do they think a man has nothing to do but to serve them? Iwant a whole fortnight after the 1st to write my address, and have two lectures [at theRoyal Institution] and a scientific conversazione to get done between now and then’’

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(Julian 1923: 11).79 Kingsley’s life as a populariser was clearly much more involved thanwe have hitherto recognised.

As Canon of Westminster, the year before his death, Kingsley published his West-minster Sermons (1874) prefacing them with his 1871 ‘‘Natural Theology of the Future.’’He urged his readers, just as he had urged the clergymen to whom he had originallyaddressed the work at Sion College, to acknowledge that it was not only possible, butnecessary that theologians accommodate the latest findings of natural science with scrip-ture even if this ultimately meant revising traditional exegesis. The harsh view of nature asred in tooth and claw, a world of premature death, of struggle, and competition was, heargued, quite compatible with ‘‘a God not merely of love, but of sternness’’ (Kingsley1874: xv).

With more than a nod towards the doubts expressed by his good friend Huxley—theoutcome of over a decade of discussion between the two men on this point—Kingsleyconcluded that it was ultimately not important whether all men of science saw testimony toGod’s existence and benevolence in the natural world, those who would not see it, hesuggested, simply had not the eyes to see such things. Rather, those, like Huxley, whoapproached nature as physical students only, concerned only with the ‘‘How’’ of things,had no business with final causes: the moral explanation of the ‘‘Why’’ of things. This wasthe job of the Natural Theologian. Thus, to reach a full account of the world, Science andReligion were necessary compliments, each fulfilling its own part of a division of labour inreaching truth about the world, and although Huxley found such a conclusion somewhatperplexing, it is clear that Kingsley promoted just the sort of middle ground that many ofhis contemporaries in both science and theology found comfortable. Theologians might goabout their business without any fear of science, but regard it instead as further testimonyto God’s lawful character,—while scientists could hold back from embroiling their ownprofession in the dubious moral quagmire of implied atheism, remaining free to legiti-mately seek their own answers without the necessity of referring back to the intervention ofsupernatural or divine fiat.80 As Kingsley had wrote to Darwin, ‘‘It is better that thedivision of labour should be complete, and that each man should do only one thing, whilehe looks on, as he finds time, at what others are doing, and so get laws from other scienceswhich he can apply, as I do, to my own’’ (F. Kingsley 1901: III, p.177).

6 Conclusion

In most accounts of the Darwinian Revolution Charles Kingsley is passed over as amarginal character. In recent years, however, his popular works, especially Water Babies,Madam How and Lady Why, and Glaucus have begun to receive serious scholarly

79 I have been unable to discover which conversazione Kingsley was referring too, or the subject on whichhe spoke. However, the text of Kingsley’s Presidential Address to the Devonshire Association was indeedcompleted in time to appear in their Transactions: (Kingsley 1871). The Hon. General Secretary for 1871was Reverend W. Harpley, MA, FCPS, of Clayhanger, near Tiverton. I am grateful to Geoff Bulley, registrarof the Devonshire Association for this information.80 Strick (2000: 112–114) briefly discusses this solution to the problems presented by the harsh realities ofDarwinian nature. He notes that Frederick Barnard, President of Columbia College in New York, was alsotroubled by the amount of death in nature and the problems it caused for natural theology, and ultimatelyfound the sort of consilience offered by Kingsley wanting. Kingsley was untroubled by death in the naturalworld, convinced that it was everlasting life in the supernatural world that mattered.

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attention. The recent publication of unabridged and annotated editions of Water Babies isfurther testament to a resurgence of interest in Kingsley and his place in the history ofscience. However, the depth to which Kingsley was embedded in the social networks of anemerging scientific community that sought to establish its own authority in a periodwracked with dynamic class and cultural politics has not previously been appreciated; norhas the extent of the audiences to which he successfully appealed. Kingsley clearly fit wellwith the rising middle class men of science, but letters from working men testify to hiscontinued popularity among them throughout his long career as well. Further, in light of hissociety success he was able to write to Darwin in 1867 that ‘‘even the Swells of the Worldare beginning to believe in you’’, noting too that ‘‘I have found actually a DarwinianMarchioness!!!!!’’ (Burkhardt et al. 2005: 423).

This account of Kingsley reminds us too of the hazy nature of the distinction historianshave drawn between men of science and popularisers of science in the early years of thisperiod, and of its gradual hardening by the end of Kingsley’s life (Morus 2007). In the1860s it was clearly as non-controversial for Kingsley to be instrumental in the foundationof the ‘Thorough Club’ as it was for Sam Wilberforce to be an active participant in theBritish Association meetings, or indeed, for Darwin to urge Kingsley on to write up hisown big book. In 1868, though, the same year in which Kingsley had recognized hisinability to review the more specialised scientific literature for Macmillans, Kingsley hadhappily received Campbell’s toast to ‘‘The Literature of Science’’—clearly important forkeeping science in the public eye, but here recognised as something short of actual science.Illustrative of this point, in 1876, the year following Kingsley’s death, the President of theGeological Society, John Evans, clearly wrestled with how to classify Kingsley’s contri-bution to a field. Reflecting upon Kingsley’s passing in his anniversary address, he notedthat ‘‘[a]lthough, owing to the many-sided and diffusive nature of his genius, he may nothave carried his studies as far as to entitle him to take any foremost place in the ranks ofscience, there are few modern writers who have done more to promote intelligent inquiryand a taste for scientific knowledge among all classes’’ (Evans 1876: pplii).

Acknowledgments I would like to thank John Beatty with whom I continue to have fruitful discussionsabout Kingsley’s theology, his science, and Water Babies, I am grateful too to the archivists at ImperialCollege London for their prompt and enthusiastic help in my research. Note: for the readers conveniencewhen quoting or citing Kingsley’s correspondence I give the references to the Letters and Memoriespublished by Kingsley’s wife. In instances where her text differs from the manuscript letter, or is onlypartially reproduced, I have given the reference to the British Library mss collection; the Darwin Corre-spondence; or the Huxley Papers.

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